Those Infernal Wings
by nira07
Summary: No matter how many times Lucifer kept cutting off the wings, they still kept growing back. And now, they might just give the whole game away. As bigger forces come into play and wreak havoc, will Chloe finally solve the riddle that is Lucifer Morningstar?
1. Chapter 1

**A/N Hey guys! This story is set a while after the events of All About Her (S3E12). Lucifer knows that (spoiler for those of you who haven't seen past the season 3 mid-season finale) Pierce is Cain, and no, Chloe doesn't fancy him yet. Although I will stick a knife in Cain's ribs if he steals Lucifer's girl. The writers are taking _far_ too long to give Chloe the big reveal so I just wrote this in the meantime to hurry things along!**

 **Do let me know what you think and any suggestions would be welcome!**

* * *

"Well another criminal behind bars, detective. And all thanks to me! If I hadn't been standing there, ready to halt that dastardly wrongdoer in their footsteps, we may have had another killer loose on the streets." Chloe rolled her eyes for the billionth time that day. First she resolved to wipe that smug grin that was plastered across Lucifer's face. She tossed her files onto her desk.

"Yeah, Lucifer. Does your definition of "ready to catch a killer" involve flirting with the married secretary?" Chloe had caught sight of a band of gold flashing on her ring finger as she interviewed her after the body was found. Lucifer raised his eyebrows in surprise.

"She was married? Ooh, much more exciting!"

"The only reason you stopped the killer was because he crashed into you as you were seducing her. It. Was. An. Accident," she said, enunciating her words with venom. "But thank God he was stopped, if inadvertently."

Lucifer threw up his hands in exasperation. "Here we go again? What is it with humans and accrediting everything to God? _He_ had nothing to with it. _I_ stopped him. I was merely pretending to be distracted. Didn't you go to detective school, Decker? It's called going _incognito._ "

Chloe gave up and threw herself onto the chair, sagging against the table as she covered her head in her hands. It had been an exhausting day. So many misleading clues, lying witnesses and a generations-old feud thrown into the mix. And the paperwork. So much paperwork. She groaned quietly, and rubbed the base of her aching neck.

"Lucifer, what are you doing?"

Lucifer had come behind her and was gently massaging her back, rubbing away the knots and tension.

"Why, giving you a back massage Detective. You look tired. And I'm your partner - it's my responsibility to help you out."

She was about to irritably say, "Getoffme" when she realised that she didn't want him to stop. He was actually rather good. Chloe supposed he had a lot of practice. The thought of that made her feel sick.

"Lucifer," she hissed, "we are in a professional place of work. You can't go round giving back massages in front of everybody." She softened on seeing his slightly wounded expression. "I appreciate the gesture though. It was very thoughtful of you."

Lucifer shrugged and sat on one of the swivelling chairs and started fiddling with one of the bobble head dolls on her desk as he propelled himself around. Chloe stared at him. He could be so… aggravating sometimes. She softened her voice into what she thought was a wheedling tone.

"You know, you being my partner and all, you could help me with…"

That was a mistake. Trust Lucifer to have interpreted her as being suggestive. He raised his eyebrows and gave her his knowing smile.

" _Why_ , detective, I am _more_ than happy to help. It took you a long time, but I knew you'd get there eventually. Women and most men too, find me simply irresistible. I must say I can't blame you…"

"No, no Lucifer. The paperwork. I want you to help me with the paperwork. You see _this_?" She gestured to the stacks of sheets strewn haphazardly over her desk.

"Well, if I remember correctly, the last time I decided to help out with the paperwork, you screamed blue murder."

"Oh for heaven's sake Lucifer…"

"There we go again. Humans and heaven…"

Chloe ploughed on, ignoring the interruption. "… If anything, you doubled the amount of work I had to do. Why? Because you sorted out the files depending on the attractiveness of the victim and whether or not the suspects were boring people. Which, by your standards, is anyone who sleeps with less than three people a week!" she finished vehemently. She looked around and noticed people giving her strange looks. She also noticed that she was standing up. She cleared her throat and sat back down.

Burying her head in her arms, she mourned her sleep-deprived state. She would apologise to him later. Right now she needed to get on with the paperwork. So many files and sheets and folders that were the bane of her existence, that bogged her down day and night. Her dreams were interspersed with sounds of shuffling sheets and popping paperclips. She could almost hear it right now.

 _Shuffle shuffle. Shuffle shuffle._

Except she wasn't dreaming. Not right now. She blinked, hardly daring to believe her eyes. Lucifer was sorting through the files, checking the dates, matching up numbers and license plates, organising the cases in chronological order, crumpling old sheets and tossing them over his shoulder, the balls of paper landing neatly in the bin. Her mouth was hanging open. She hadn't actually thought he would listen to her.

Dan stopped in his tracks on the way to the fridge and did a double take.

"Is this for real? Lucifer Morningstar handling the _paperwork_? There really is a first time for everything isn't there?"

Lucifer rolled his eyes and didn't deign to face him when he delivered his cutting retort. "Unfortunately not, Detective Douche. That pot belly of yours isn't going on holiday, no matter how many water sports you take up."

Dan's cheeks reddened slightly, and Chloe fought to bite back a laugh. Even Lieutenant Pierce raised his eyebrows from his office.

And so, she and Lucifer continued to work in a comfortable silence.

xxxxxxxx

It was dark when they left the office. Lucifer, for once, wasn't talking. If they weren't bickering, Lucifer would be cracking jokes to try and make her laugh. He seemed strangely sullen and uncharacteristic for a pompous ass.

She rested her hand on his arm. "Lucifer, you okay?" She paused, finding the words. "I may have been a bit harsh earlier. I didn't really mean it. I appreciate the things you do for me."

He turned around and looked at her, his eyes strangely unreadable.

"Why wouldn't you appreciate me Detective? Looks like this and the brains and brawn to match – I'm the whole package." His heart wasn't really in the joke. It sounded as forced as his smile looked.

They had reached the parking lot. Suddenly, he turned around to face her, a different expression on his face, which Chloe couldn't quite identify. They were standing very close to one another. She could smell his aftershave. It was intoxicating. If she leaned closer, she could…

"Good night, Chloe," he said, his voice heavy with emotion. Almost impulsively, he turned to give her a soft kiss on the cheek. Then he started walking towards his car.

Chloe stood there, dazed.

 _What had just happened?_

Lucifer _never_ called her Chloe, only when it was important. And that kiss. She hadn't ever seen him like this before.

xxxxxxxx

"Hey, Maze," Chloe called as she entered her house, still thinking about Lucifer. She peered into Trixie's bedroom and frowned. "Where's Trixie?" No reply. She turned to the living room. She had found Maze – draped over some young man. They were embracing… passionately.

"Maze!"

"Oh hey, Decker," drawled Maze, as she ran her talon down the man's chest. "Wanna join?" Chloe tried to suppress a shiver of disgust and privately thought that she would rather have gouged out her eyeballs with one of Maze's toys. She bristled with irritation.

"What are you doing, Maze? What if Trixie sees?"

"Hey, chill Decker. Trixie's having a sleepover with Gummy, remember?"

 _Gummy?_

 _Gemma. The sleepover with Gemma!_

She'd completely forgotten. Chloe sighed with relief. Trixie's wouldn't have her mind scarred for one more day. She turned to ask if there was anything to eat, then shuddered and decided it would be best to just go upstairs.

The memory of Lucifer's expression still haunted her. There were so many things that were left unsaid between them. How they really felt about each other. And the sheer number of unexplained events that had happened were mind boggling. Chloe had come to ignore it and take it all as part of Lucifer's weirdness, but there were some things which she truly couldn't put her finger on. And the last time she'd tried to open up to him, he'd ghosted her. Technically, it wasn't his fault. He was, allegedly, kidnapped.

And all those things which he still hadn't fully told her the truth about. Things that were too bizarre. He had been shot several times in the chest, on three separate occasions, and still survived. Those near death experiences, horrible scars, and a weird, complicated family she just couldn't get her head around. If someone had told her a couple of years ago, that she would be working with a nightclub owner named Lucifer Morningstar, she would have laughed in their face. What kind of parent names their kid Lucifer? The ultimate incarnation of evil? A scene from a few weeks back swam into her mind.

 _"Lucifer Morningstar at your service." He flashed a toothy grin._

 _The man's eyes bulged. "Lu..ci..fer?" he whispered, incredulous._

 _"That's right. I have many other names. You can call me Satan, the Devil, Mephistopheles, Shaitan, Belial, and there are many, many more, but my personal favourite is Beelzebub. Very expressive don't you think? Of course, you may call me bubby for short."_

 _The man's face was beetroot red, and a vein in his temple throbbed dangerously._

 _"Bubby?" he whispered hoarsely. And then the man turned to Chloe and asked her if she happened to go by the name of Jezebel._

 _"No!" she had said, shooting daggers at Lucifer, "My name's Chloe Decker and I'm a detective with the LAPD..."_

The unique shade of red that had coloured the man's face did not fade throughout the entire conversation. Beetroot man, as Lucifer later dubbed him, had in fact been jailed for embezzling half a million dollars from a charity. No wonder he looked that thunderstruck when someone parading as the devil came to haunt him.

Lucifer, despite his insistence that he was truly the prince of darkness, wasn't really evil. Oh, his intentions could definitely be misplaced, but he always had a good aim behind them. Despite what anyone said about his scruples, he truly did care about justice, about punishing the sinners and rewarding the worthy. In that big messed up metaphor which he insisted was his reality, he seemed quite hurt that people thought he was evil. But the Lucifer she knew had a good heart.

But what if it wasn't a metaphor?

 _Stop it_ , she chided herself mentally. Even if the devil did exist, and he decided to come to earth, why on earth would he decide to join the LAPD? Surely the Devil's thirst for punishing sinners would be a worldwide task? He would have joined Interpol.

Chloe had often entertained the possibility that Lucifer wasn't making things up. But she could never fully convince herself to believe it. Hell was a place that people made up to make people scared of the consequences of being bad. Peasants in the middle ages were told that if they didn't cough up the money, they would go straight to the pits of hell. It was a fearmongering tactic. Like when she told Trixie that she would need an operation to cut the chewing gum from her throat if she swallowed it. She chuckled softly. Trixie still wouldn't go near one.

She checked her watch. 10 o'clock. Oh screw it. She grabbed her keys and her phone and headed out.

"Don't wait up for me Maze, I don't know when I'll be back."

Chloe heard a thump, followed by a short giggle. She didn't know if Maze had heard her. She decided she didn't want to find out.

She walked into Lux. A party was going on at full swing. Music was blaring out from the speakers, people's bodies were pressed together in the swirl of lights, as the dancers moved in time to the rhythm. A nightclub definitely hadn't been Chloe's scene, but during her friendship with Lucifer, the atmosphere had a warm sense of familiarity about it. She walked up to the elevator, and waited for the soft ping.

xxxxxxxxx

Lucifer stared out of the ceiling-to-floor windows, gazing as the cityscape before him: the city being still as busy and vivacious as it would be during the day.

Los Angeles. The city of Angels: ironic, considering the layers of subterfuge and deceit that lay underneath all of the glitz and the glamour. Betrayal, murder, lying, backstabbing. He saw it week in, week out. And they had the nerve to blame him. Him didn't make them do it. When humans got themselves into trouble it would be the devil's fault, when they get out of it, it would be by their own skill, or worse, they thought that God did it.

He was sitting, alone, at his piano, his wings rustling as the lights from the bustling city outside gently illuminated the expansive room. How did he get from the fiery bowels of hell to here? Why did have a glass clutched in his hand, full of expensive liquor that he wouldn't even react to? The perks of having a superhuman metabolism meant that he couldn't get drunk, even if he drank enough to paralyse an alcoholic.

Chloe's words replayed in his mind again.

 _…boring people. Which, by your standards, is anyone who sleeps with less than three people a week_

By that definition, he was a boring person too.

He, obviously, still liked to poke fun with the ladies, but they didn't mean as much to him anymore. Of course, they didn't really mean anything in the first place; they were just there for his amusement. But, recently, he preferred to be alone. Or better, spend time with Chloe. Although she didn't fully understand about his life, and his problems with his mum, and his divine dad, and being manipulated into being a pawn in his game, and his pledge to help Cain, and those infernal wings popping up at random times, her just being there helped.

When did the King of Hell become so sentimental?

He brought the glass down on the lid of the piano, harder than he meant to, and the crystal shattered into several pieces. He winced with pain. He looked down in confusion at his hand, which was streaming with rivulets of blood.

The realization dawned on him just as the elevator pinged.

"Lucifer, I…"

Chloe eyes widened as she took in Lucifer, shirtless, with his wings stretched in their full glory, the white feathers luminescent with a pearly sheen.

Her world tilted sideways, and she barely registered Lucifer darting towards her to catch her before her head hit the ground.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N Hey guys! A huge, enormous thank you to all of you amazing people who read my story, and especially those wonderful souls who have followed or favourited or written a review. Your feedback really means a lot to me and has emboldened me to carry on. I'll try and update once a week, if I can, and my profuse apologies for any delays.**

 **Just a warning, there is some mild gore later on in the chapter but it isn't too graphic, I hope.**

* * *

 _An eagle soars over the tops of the trees, its blood coursing through its veins with the thrill of being alive. It surveys the terrain down below, small and insignificant in comparison to its own majesty. Its loud screech echoes for miles around._

 _Suddenly, the eagle catches a flash of brilliant white in the distance, pecking its way among the mossy floor and the bracken strewn ground. Unfolding its magnificent wings, the eagle dives down, landing behind a fine, alabaster bird. The eagle cries out to get the bird's attention._

 _The white bird is a pigeon._

 _Then in a drawling, British accent, the albino pigeon opens its mouth and speaks._

 _"Hello, Detective"._

* * *

Chloe sat bolt upright. That was _bizarre_. Why on earth had she been dreaming about _pigeons_? Chloe had read somewhere that you dreamed about the things you were thinking of before you fell asleep. So why had she been thinking about poultry and Lucifer? Shaking her head as she tried to forget about the utterly weird dream, she pushed the pink duvet covers aside and…

Wait. Pink?

She looked around her suspiciously. She had fallen asleep in Trixie's room. That was weird. Chloe sat back down and tried to remember what had happened yesterday. Her mind drew a blank.

 _Okay, Decker. Think methodically._

She had walked out of the precinct with Lucifer, like always, and then…

The memories came rushing back. The kiss. His strange mood. The unanswered questions. Lux. The elevator. The wings. The wings. The wings.

Chloe immediately felt a searing pain in her temples and cried out. Maze came running, hefting a large baseball bat. Naturally it was studded with onyx that had been filed to dangerous, glistening points.

"What's the matter, Decker?" she asked. "I thought somebody was attacking you!" Maze seemed almost disappointed that there wasn't anybody to beat up. Chloe blinked, dazed with confusion.

"What happened last night, Maze? I can't remember how I got back."

"Well, I was having some fun with my new friend Jules. I asked if you wanted to join, and then you said no. I was like, whatever, more for me, and then I did this thing where I…"

"Ugh, spare me the details. What happened when I returned?"

Maze shrugged, unconcerned.

"I don't know. I fell asleep with Jules. When I woke up you were back and were sleeping in Trixie's bed."

Chloe narrowed her eyes at Maze's story. She had to be lying. Maze, who could tell if Lucifer was in danger ten miles away and had the senses of a bloodhound, didn't notice her come in? Chloe was about to question her further when she realised that Maze was already up. Her housemate only ever rolled out of bed after Chloe had left for work, which meant that…

"What time is it?" Chloe asked looking desperately for a clock.

"Nine thirty." Maze swung the baseball bat, if it could even be called that, over her shoulder and swaggered out of the room.

Crap!

Chloe flung herself out of the bedroom and ran up the stairs, cursing Maze's name all the while.

###

Chloe ran down the precinct stairs, practising her profuse apologies for being late. She arrived, slightly out of breath, at her desk.

She'd expected Lucifer to be leaning against it, in his immaculate suit, ready to come up with some cheeky reprimand for her tardiness, but there was no-one there. She felt a stab of disappointment that she tried not to acknowledge. She needed to figure out what had happened before she went to Lux. When she tried to remember, all of her memories were confused and fuzzy.

"Chloe, what happened? Why are you so late?" asked Dan, waving a file.

She didn't really fancy telling him that she got caught up in a dream about talking birds, so she said, "My alarm didn't go off." Well, it was true.

"No homicides have been reported this morning, and most of our recent cases have been closed, thanks to you." Chloe raised her eyebrows.

"And Lucifer too, I suppose," Dan added hastily. "But you've got a backlog of evaluations that need doing, and you need to update the archive too."

Chloe rolled her eyes, but had to agree that not being in the field today gave her the perfect opportunity to get the boring stuff out of the way. It was a dull, mindless task, even more so, since Lucifer wasn't here to liven things up. She kept checking the stairs to see if he was coming, but she was always disappointed. She couldn't even call him - in her hurry to leave home, she had forgotten her phone, which is why Lucifer wasn't getting bombarded with angry calls right now.

The hours passed by, and Chloe was finally finished. She took a coffee break, when an overenthusiastic Ella bundled her into a hug.

"Hey Chloe!" she said. "I have had so much work…" Ella started babbling on in her usual animated manner, and Chloe slipped in a few words of agreement in those rare occasions Ella paused to take a breath.

Ella's phone whistled to get her attention. She checked it apprehensively.

"There's been a homicide – multiple, actually by the looks of it."

Chloe perked up; her day was about to get more interesting, but Ella looked crestfallen.

"I'm drowning in toxicology reports and what is life's solution? – dumping another bucket of cases over my head." She sighed. "Well, I suppose we'd better get going."

###

Lucifer checked his phone for the tenth time that afternoon, and promptly returned to gazing at the ceiling.

"You aren't going to get it to ring just by staring at it, Lucifer," said Linda, her voice stretched with mild irritation. "Why don't you call her?"

Lucifer didn't reply. He was lost in his own thoughts.

"You realise I can't help you if you don't speak to me," she tried again, a little more gently this time. The trouble with Amenadiel and Maze was getting to her, and she couldn't let it get involved in her work. Admittedly, she wasn't doing too much work these past two hours, considering the patient in question had not opened his mouth since he'd set foot in the office. Something was off – Lucifer never shut up unless he was embroiled in inner turmoil.

There was more stony silence. Linda huffed and threw up her hands, and started typing away, trying not to let her thoughts stray to Amenadiel. For a few minutes, the sound of Linda's tapping was the only thing that filled the room.

"Chloe saw my wings."

Linda was _floored_.

Of all things, she hadn't expected _that_. She wanted to leap out of her seat, run over to him and shake him for the details, but told herself to not respond. _My turn for the silent treatment_. She sat there, pegging away, wanting her face not to betray that she was desperate to find out what had happened, and how her emotionally-reticent patient had reacted. Something told her the answer was, not very well.

Lucifer stared at her. Affronted, he sat up and stared at the therapist, waiting for her to say something.

"Hello, Linda. Didn't you hear what I just said? She saw my _wings_."

Satisfied that she had, at last, fully engaged Lucifer in a conversation, she moved back to her seat.

She looked at him, took in his panic, and asked gently, "Does she know you're the Devil?"

At this, Lucifer got up and started pacing the room.

"I could have told her that I was the Devil, Satan himself, King of Hell, Prince of Darkness, until I was blue in the face and she still wouldn't believe me. Then, she bursts into my apartment, sees my wings, and then collapses!"

Linda tried to stop herself from rolling her eyes. Of course Lucifer would feel insulted that Chloe had the sheer _audacity_ to faint.

"Lucifer, it's not every day that someone stumbles upon an angel, especially if that someone is a person they've known for a long time. She was shocked. Fainting is a completely natural reaction."

Linda snorted. "At least she got to see beautiful, divinely angelic wings. I had to see your Devil face. I was in shock for days."

He huffed. "If we could get back to my problems, Doctor? So after she had collapsed, I flew her back home, put her in the urchin's bed. _I_ was the shocked one – I didn't realise she would have reacted the way she did."

"Well, have you spoken to her about it?" pressed Linda, unable to check her curiosity.

"I went to the precinct this morning, 8 o'clock sharp, as per usual. I waited for an hour and she still didn't turn up. She's avoiding me." Lucifer decided.

Linda thought to herself that Lucifer had done exactly that to her when he upped and ran to Vegas and married the bimbo Candy, but she didn't think that would be particularly helpful to bring up in this situation.

"The feeling while I was waiting there was completely new to me. I kept checking the stairs to see if she would turn up but she didn't. She hasn't even called or anything."

 _It's called rejection and disappointment_ , thought Linda. _No wonder it's new to you._ She attempted to smother a smile. Lucifer obviously liked Chloe, and Linda just didn't understand how both of them couldn't see it yet.

"It wasn't funny, Linda. I was there looking like a lonely twit for half an hour. Even the receptionist with no friends was looking sorry for me. It isn't good for my reputation."

"What do you think you should do now, Lucifer?" Linda sometimes hated her job. As a therapist, she could never give the answers, only lead the client to them. Sometimes, she felt that even if Lucifer was given the route with flashing neon signs pointing at the answer, he wouldn't get there. She often felt the urge to stand up on her chair and scream the solution at him. More often than not, he completely misinterpreted her advice and landed himself into even deeper scrapes. She often wondered why she bothered, even if he did pay double the expensive rates.

"I don't know!" said Lucifer, despairing, sinking back into the couch. Then he got up again. "What I don't know, is why I'm feeling all cut up about this. I shouldn't care if she's avoiding me or not. I'm the King of Hell, not a snivelling, sentimental…."

Lucifer's phone rang. The face of the King of Hell lit up with sheer delight and he eagerly checked the screen. His face fell again, as he declined the call.

"It's Ella. I swear, if I get another, "How are you feeling today, Lucifer?" I might just ram this phone…."

The phone rang again. Linda raised her eyebrows.

"Oh fine, I'll take it." He gingerly pressed the phone to his ear, clearly expecting an earful from Ella.

"Detective? Why are you calling from Miss Lopez's phone? What..Yes, I'll be right there."

Lucifer shrugged on his jacket, more animated than he had been all morning.

"You really are a wonderful therapist, Linda. The feeling's just completely vanished. You're a miracle worker."

He gave her a quick wave and left the room.

Linda smiled again, shaking her head. The man was so _dense_.

###

Ducking under the yellow police tape, Lucifer caught sight of Ella and Chloe crouching beside two bodies.

"Well, what do we have here?" asked Lucifer, bending down to where Ella and Chloe were standing.

"Oh my God, Lucifer!" Ella exclaimed, holding a hand over her heart. Lucifer huffed at the expression. "Don't creep up on people like that. My heart just spazzed. I would give you a hug, but I'm covered in blood."

He looked put out. "I'd rather you didn't." He looked uncertainly towards Chloe. She hadn't sounded as if anything was wrong on the phone earlier, but she still hadn't acknowledged him yet.

She finally looked up from studying the corpses and saw Lucifer peering into her face, like he was checking her for some sort of disease. His face jolted something inside her mind, and she recalled the image, clear as day.

Last night she had gone, seized by impulse, to Lux, and took the elevator to Lucifer's apartment.

He had been sitting at his piano, blood streaming down his arm, with two glorious, angelic wings stretched out behind him, protruding from the exact place where the scars had been.

And then, she'd blacked out, after feeling Lucifer's body around her own.

That was it. She'd finally gone insane. The work had been getting to her, and the stress had made her mind go funny. Lucifer's drivel about him really being the son of God had penetrated her subconscious and her mind was concocting weird visions. She needed a holiday.

But there was something nagging her at the back of her mind. If this was all just a figment of her overactive imagination, then why had she ended up in Trixie's bedroom, fully clothed, wearing her shoes? Why had Maze not told her the truth of how she really got there? And why did those images seem so real? She shook her head, utterly confused.

"… Chloe. Chloe! You okay?" Ella was looking at her, a concerned expression on her face.

"Yes, I'm fine – why wouldn't I be?"

"Maybe because you were staring into Lucifer's face for a full three minutes, with your eyes glazed over?"

Chloe came into her senses, and her mind returned to the case at hand. She could sort out the other weirdness later. She got the file that was in her hands and smacked Lucifer across the shoulder.

"Where were you? Just because I come late doesn't mean you don't have work to do!" Before Lucifer could cut in with his snappy retort, Chloe had already asked for a report from Ella.

The two bodies were lying a few feet away from each other. The man was lying in a sticky pool of his own blood that had come from a big puncture to his heart, whereas the woman had blood streaming from her throat, and the knife was still in her right hand.

"So, judging from the blade, the knife that our lady is holding was used to stab the man and slit her throat. So, we have our murder weapon."

Lucifer glanced over the morbid scene. "It's obvious, isn't it? Woman over here stabs this man, and then swallowed by her own grief and horror, pulls the knife on herself and slits her own throat."

"Got it in one," said Ella. "See here, the knife is a standard right-handed blade - the serrations used to make the incision are on the left side of it. From the increasing depth of the wound, we can see that the knife was dragged from the woman's left to right. If it was self-inflicted, the wielder of the blade had to be right handed. If someone else did it, they would have to be left-handed, which is highly unlikely considering the knife would have snagged on the skin and been too difficult to use - we would have gotten a jagged cut, not a smooth one like this."

"The man also has some bruising, and has some skin cells under his fingernails, which indicate sign of struggle," continued Chloe, "but not so with our woman. See here." She gestured to some thin scratches on the cuff of her coat. "When the tests come back, the skin cells will probably match up with her DNA."

Dan jogged over, having spoken to some nearby police officers. "There were no witnesses. But considering the fact that the woman killed him, and then turned the knife on herself, it's probably going to be an open-and-shut case."

"But we don't know why, though, Dan. We haven't even ID'd our victim or murderess. Why did she murder this man, and why did she kill herself afterwards instead of running away?"

"It's an isolated case, Chloe, the LAPD will only spend police hours if the murderer is still at large, or if it's a series of related incidents…"

Lucifer tuned out of the conversation. The woman was lying on the floor, spread-eagled, but the hem of her trousers had come up a few inches. On the smooth pale skin, were a set of interweaving lines. He reached over, and gingerly pulled up the fabric to reveal the whole design.

It was a tattoo of a snake, curling up around her ankle twice, before crossing down to eat its own tail. No, it wasn't a snake. It had wings. Lucifer recoiled and sprang back, as though he had been stung. The dragon eating its tail was _his_ symbol; he had been the serpent that had offered the apple to Eve and the cyclical nature of the emblem signified the never ending punishment he delivered in Hell. It had to be a coincidence.

"A tattoo," Chloe breathed from over his shoulder. "This is going to be one of those cases."

"What do you mean?" asked Ella.

"Lieutenant Pierce is going to shut this case down as an isolated incident, but this case isn't over," said Chloe, an edge of determination to her voice. "There's something bigger going on here, and that tattoo is going to tell us what."

"One "edgy" tattoo doesn't make her part of a gang, Chloe," said Dan, looking unconvinced. She shook her head, knowing in her gut that she was right, that the symbol on her ankle tied the dead woman to something larger, that she just didn't understand yet.

"I don't know, but we'll find out soon." Chloe walked off, her mind swirling with the images of the corpses and a winged Lucifer, leaving her partner to keep staring at the inked dragon, with the feeling of uneasiness becoming heavier and heavier in the pit of his stomach.

 _It's just a coincidence. It's just some Satanic gang or Leviathan cult._

But the anxiousness didn't dissipate.

A few hours later, he walked into Lux, ignoring the party that was raging below, and making his way straight towards the elevator.

He stepped out into his luxurious apartment, illuminated only by the city lights outside. He waited, sensing something different.

A voice called out from the darkness.

"Hello, brother mine."

* * *

 **A/N So there you have it. Chapter 2! Chloe doesn't believe what she has seen, but the image just won't let her go! She is in denial, as is Lucifer who is in denial about his emotional attachment to her. So who is the mystery sibling? Let me know what you think.**


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N Hello everyone! I'm updating a couple of days early because I started writing this chapter before I wrote chapter 2 - that's weird I know. So this chapter doesn't have Chloe featuring in it BUT is instrumental to the plot nonetheless.**

 **This is an AU - so I'm not following the events of the remainder of season 3 at all. I haven't even watched past "The Last Heartbreak" because I'm waiting for all the episodes to be released and watch them all in one go, because my heart is going to break from the will-they/won't-they Chloe-Lucifer-Pierce triangle and the suspense of it all. Chloe x Pierce is _not_ happening in this fic (bleurgh) and Cain is not going to be taking a central focus to this story at all. I _promise_ that Detective Decker will be returning to her main role as the main protagonist of the story from the next chapter, and she WILL confront the truth - sooner rather than later.**

 **Without any further ado - Chapter 3**

* * *

 _A voice called out from the darkness._

 _"Hello, brother mine."_

Lucifer stopped still. He had many siblings. Admittedly only a few of them were female. Fewer still would wish to speak with the king of Hell. And only one would have the audacity to invite themselves into his home, lie on his favourite couch while drinking his top-shelf bourbon. Lucifer smiled.

"You know, if you are going to take my finest liquor, you could at least use a glass instead of swigging straight from the decanter. Rather uncouth of you, I must say."

The woman laughed. A male voice chuckled from beside her.

"I see these long years on earth have not changed you, brother," the man said. Lucifer flicked on the lights. They hadn't changed much since he'd last seen them: olive-skinned, with luscious brown curls framing their angular face. He supposed most people would find them beautiful, in a classical sense. They certainly dressed as if they had stepped out of a Renaissance painting, with billowing black robes draped elegantly over their lithe bodies.

Amenadiel, in contrast, burst through the elevator doors like a headless chicken – albeit minus the wings – panting, having donned his usual attire of faded jeans and oversized hoodie.

"Lucifer, there's another celestial in the city. Powerful. Even I could sense…" He trailed off, registering the fact that there were two other people in the room. He stiffened.

Lucifer grinned wickedly.

"Why yes, Amenadiel, the twins have come to visit."

At the mention of his name, the atmosphere tightened. The guests, once relaxed, stood tense and ready to pounce, snarling quietly with barely disguised hatred.

"The twins?" Amenadiel's brow furrowed in confusion. Then it came to him.

 _The twins._

Abaddon and Azrael.

 _Prince and Princess of Hell._

 _Oh, great._

Amenadiel's eyes narrowed as he drew himself up to his full height.

"Why are you here?" he asked, addressing mostly Azrael. Of the pair, she held the most influence over the other. Where she went, her twin followed. Amenadiel remembered the days when Abaddon, as a young angel, would fight, kicking and screaming, to be by his sister. They trained together. They fought together. And they fell together. Their loyalty to each other superseded everything else.

Azrael cocked a smile, having relaxed into the picture of calm, elegant poise.

"Why, to visit our favourite brother, of course," she replied.

"They mean me," Lucifer clarified, "not you." He could picture it like it was yesterday. Standing in front of the gates to Paradise, they stood either side of him as he waged war on Father - the first to join his cause when he rallied his armies. _Ah, the good days_. The twins smiled at each other, then turned their gazes to Amenadiel, cold light entering their eyes.

"The real question is, Amenadiel, why you are here on Earth," said Abaddon, grinning slyly. "Lucifer wanted a holiday from Hell, understandably so, yet why have _you_ sought respite from the Silver City?"

There was a pause. Abaddon exchanged amused glances with his twin.

"Perhaps Father's demands were wearying you, Amenadiel," Azrael suggested. "Perhaps, you are on holiday too. After all, if even _Father_ needed a break after six days of creating the Earth, then surely you deserve one too, after all these millennia." She paused, the silence heavy with meaning, then grinned wickedly.

"Or is it," she drawled, slowly, "that you are not welcome back?" She cocked her head to the side, her eyes filled with silent challenge.

Amenadiel clenched his jaw, his hands curling into fists.

"No, Azrael, how could you forget?" Abaddon's eyebrows were drawn together in mock confusion. " _Amenadiel_ here is Father's _favourite_ son. How could he punish him so?" Abaddon's eyebrows were drawn together in mock confusion.

Azrael laughed. "If Father exiles his favourite son from His home, then what fate awaits the rest of his children, I wonder."

Lucifer was watching the speaking match bounce back and forth with some amusement. He had forgotten how much fun it was to see Amenadiel all riled up. That was quite a verbal lashing he was getting. Abaddon and Azrael were both seasoned warriors, but the skill they preferred was their power of speech. This was _nothing_ in comparison to the torture they unleashed on the wicked in Hell. It was their most powerful weapon, apart from Azrael's blade.

Lucifer smiled to himself with understanding.

 _Ah. That's why they were here._

Lucifer almost felt sorry for Amenadiel. He seemed quite wounded. Then he remembered how Amenadiel had thwarted so many of his plans, and how he still took Father's side even when dear old Dad had clearly forsaken him. Lucifer happily discovered that the feeling had vanished.

Amenadiel's voice shook with suppressed anger.

"Careful, Azrael, the sharpness of your tongue may just cut you yet."

Azrael grinned. Lucifer cut in before the verbal battle could escalate.

"Alright, I'll bite, again. I am very fond of the two of you, but everyone knows you aren't just here to pay me a visit, even if I am your favourite brother. Which leads me to ask why you've really come?"

Azrael stared into Lucifer's eyes. The silence was heavy, and the four of them stood still, as though one movement would bring the whole place down.

A beat passed.

"Where is my sword?"

Lucifer had guessed correctly. He wondered if they'd had anything to do with the murders that happened today. He couldn't shake off the feeling that the curling dragon tattoo was somehow related specifically to him. A warning, maybe?

"It's not here," said Amenadiel, before Lucifer had the chance to open his mouth.

"Well, I know that," said Azrael, rolling her eyes with contempt. "The sword flies to my hand if it is in the vicinity. You think I wouldn't be able to sense a blade that I forged and steeped in my own blood if it was right next to me?"

"Where is it?" Abaddon hissed.

"Mum's…" Lucifer began, before Amenadiel cut him off again.

"I'm surprised you haven't heard already, Abaddon. You and your sister seem _quite_ well-informed as to the happenings on Heaven and Earth."

"One hears things on the grapevine. Although, the news tends to get delayed due to our _southerly_ position on it," Abaddon growled.

"Why…" Amenadiel started to deliver his retort, but then, Azrael, running out of patience, slammed her hand down on the top of the bar. The black marble cracked down the middle. Her brothers widened their eyes. The floor around her appeared to disintegrate, and Lucifer recognised the fires of Hell billowing at her feet, and the screams of tortured souls added to the din of raging fires. Her blazing red eyes glared with pure hostility at Amenadiel.

"I will not ask again." Her voice had turned guttural, with a deep, unearthly quality and resonated loudly throughout the room.

"WHERE IS IT, AMENADIEL?" she roared, her hands alight with blood-red fire.

Amenadiel, to his credit looked unfazed, and stared her down, despite him being completely powerless to stop her if she chose to smite him down. The room shook slightly. Lucifer had to stop this before Azrael took on her full demonic form and incinerated everything within a three-mile radius. The penthouse had been expensive, and the last thing he wanted was to have a section of Hell to appear right here where he lived.

Lucifer turned towards her, willing his demonic form to change his features.

"Azrael, as your King, I _command_ you to stop."

There was a struggle of wills for a few seconds, Azrael furiously struggling against the orders which bound her, and then she finally relented. She screeched with a raucous cry, and then the light in her eyes dimmed; the floor began to materialize at her feet, and the hellish cacophony faded into silence. Azrael was panting heavily, a murderous look on her face still on her face. "TELL ME!"

Lucifer stretched out his neck, feeling his human form meld back onto his skin. He hissed, annoyed.

"As I was about to say before I was so rudely interrupted," Lucifer said, glaring at Amenadiel, before turning back to her, "the blade did use to be here on Earth. _However_ , long story short, it is now in another dimension."

"Which one?" she shot back.

Lucifer winced.

"The one in which our mother currently resides."

Azrael's face hardened.

" _WHAT_?"

"Does she have all the pieces?" Abaddon asked, a hint of fear creeping into his voice. "Does she wield the flaming sword?"

"What do you take me for, an idiot? She has just the blade and the medallion, which she cannot use. The flaming sword cannot be formed without all three components. Amenadiel has the key." Lucifer shrugged. "Sorry folks, no more sword of fire."

Azrael's expression didn't change. Lucifer was mildly surprised. He had expected her to look annoyed at having lost her favourite blade, especially after her overreaction with Amenadiel earlier, but her face was impassive, like stone. She had an impressive poker-face. _Never play cards with these two,_ he thought to himself.

Amenadiel, however, didn't let the subject drop.

"Mother went into the new universe months ago. Why do you care about its loss now? What did you want to use it for, sister?"

The twins hissed. Azrael was trembling with barely contained anger.

"You lost the right to call me sister the day Father cast us out. You lost the right to use that name, and that bond between us broke, when you watched, silently, as Father damned us all," she spat out, seething.

Amenadiel couldn't believe what he was hearing. "You waged war on Father himself," he shot back, incredulous. "You were at fault, Azrael. What you did was _wrong_!"

She laughed mirthlessly. "Perhaps they do things differently in Heaven since we were exiled, because we don't let our residents evade us as shamelessly as that down in Hell. The _righteousness_ of my actions is not what I was discussing. _You_ stood next to Father's throne, his favourite son," she sneered, "and you didn't open your mouth."

Amenadiel opened and closed his mouth, scrambling for the words.

"Right or wrong, I would have begged Father on my knees for leniency to save my brethren," said Abaddon. "You had the power to change things, Amenadiel, and you know it. He would have listened to you. You and the rest of the seraphim allow those _humans_ to seek forgiveness for their vile sins, but you could not forgive your own siblings?"

"No, because _you were_ _silent._ "

The twins had moved while they were speaking so that they now flanked Lucifer, Azrael to his right and Abaddon to his left. Their stance reminded him of the way Lucifer and his rebellious siblings had stood in Father's throne room as He had dictated their sentence. _Stop it_. Lucifer willed the memory out of his head.

Lucifer had not realised the extent of the twins' hatred towards Amenadiel specifically. He'd assumed that the animosity they were displaying was their aversion to their angelic siblings in general.

Then, in a rare moment of compassion, he understood. They weren't angry at being sent to Hell. As John Milton succinctly had captured, it was better to rule in Hell than to serve in Heaven – Lucifer had done both. They were angry because they had been shunned by the family they had trusted. He was about to scoff at them for being so weak and snap about the perks they had as the Prince and Princess of Hell, when he realised he had asked Mum the very same thing.

 _Why did you let it happen?_

He didn't realise he had spoken the words out loud.

Amenadiel saw Lucifer's eyes, suddenly tired with the weight of all they had seen these past millennia. He looked at his insubordinate kin, saddened.

"Father's word is the Law. There is no other."

 _Dura lex, sed lex._

It is a hard law, but it is the law.

Lucifer hated the ancient Romans.

Constantly killing innocent people and conquering and pillaging other lands, yet always babbling on about honour and sacrifice.

Hell was full of those Latin-speaking bastards.

###

Silence. No-one had spoken for what seemed like a century. It was awkward. Even Lucifer was beginning to squirm.

"Well, that's been quite the family reunion," said Lucifer. "I do hope you all clear off."

He eyed the twins suspiciously. "I hope you aren't planning on staying. I already have to put up with _him_ , and Mum was a headache I don't even want to think about."

Abaddon snorted.

"I don't understand what fascinates you here, brother. They are just mortals. Always looking, but never seeing."

"No, we aren't staying here," Azrael said. "There are a lot of ... unfinished things to take care of in Edom." She trailed her hand down the fissure she had created in the marble.

 _But you aren't unfolding your wings and flying off either_ , Lucifer noted with irritation.

He wheeled around and glared at Amenadiel.

"If you're planning on spending the night here, I'm calling Maze to get rid of you."

Amenadiel stiffened visibly. He knew Lucifer didn't make empty threats. Having Maze trying to cut his throat out was the last thing he needed right now.

"I'm leaving," he said, his voice thick as he looked at his three siblings suspiciously. "Goodbye Azrael, Abaddon."

They stood, impassively, and didn't acknowledge his farewell. The elevator pinged, and he was gone. The atmosphere slackened, if only a little.

Lucifer looked at the two of them.

"What unfinished things, Azrael?"

"It's a small matter we have to finish investigating. It's under control," she assured him. Lucifer didn't drop his gaze. Abaddon sighed.

"The demons have been getting more agitated recently, more reckless and hungry, venturing to other realms in greater numbers and more often, including Earth. They are less obedient. We have cause to believe that someone in the upper levels may be stirring them up. Someone powerful."

Lucifer frowned at the news, but such things happened from time to time. Uprisings were immediately squashed once Lucifer's lieutenants - his inner circle of his loyal brothers and sister- got on the case. Once in a while, someone would get a little power hungry, but they yielded in the end.

"We'll take care of it," reassured Abaddon. "It won't take long to interrogate one of the minor demons, and put the troublemaker in their place."

Azrael and Abaddon still made no sign of intending to leave. Lucifer was beginning to get irritated. It was as if they expected him to sprout a tail on the spot.

"Stop staring at me and spit it out, one of you," he huffed, annoyed.

"Where have you really hidden the sword?" asked Abaddon. "We understand, you might have wanted to keep it a secret from Amenadiel, but…"

Abaddon was quelled at the cold look Lucifer shot at him.

"I never lie. I truly don't have the blade. After Mum entered the void, I removed the key, and kicked the sword and the medallion inside before it sealed itself. The blade couldn't stay here on earth. There wouldn't be any humans left. I had no use for the sword then, although I admit, it would be very useful to solve a problem I have right now." Lucifer had often regretted not keeping the sword, as it probably would have been powerful enough to kill Cain. Well, kill him permanently.

Azrael looked at him intently, then suddenly, sighed in relief, and the two of them relaxed, the tension visibly draining out of them as if water had been poured on a taut cloth. Abaddon plonked himself down on the sofa and started twiddling with one of the ornaments on the table. Azrael took a seat at the destroyed bar, as though she was dizzy with relief, and poured herself a drink.

Lucifer was confused at their reaction. Something wasn't adding up.

"As much as I hate to admit it, Amenadiel was right. Why have you come now, and why did you want it?" Lucifer asked.

"You've forgotten - time travels differently in Hell. Sometimes it's faster and sometimes it's slower. I only learned that my blade was missing a couple of days ago, and we left Hell to come here the _instant_ brother Asmodeus had told us everything about Uriel and Mother being here on earth, and her insane plan to march on Heaven. He didn't know the location of the sword. I had not realised so much time had transpired between then and now for you," Azrael explained.

Lucifer exhaled in relief. They couldn't have organised the murders this morning. Just some dim-witted power-hungry mortals behind it, after all.

"And as for the reason we wanted the blade, well, contrary to popular belief, our intentions weren't devious and deadly. The blade is a dangerous weapon, and shouldn't be wielded by anyone in Heaven, Hell or Earth other than myself or my brother. It corrupts people. If even goody-goody Uriel plotted to kill Mother, then who knows what kind of carnage could have been unleashed. You've seen first-hand what happens when the mortals get hold of it. It would upset the balance. Getting the blade into another dimension was the perfect solution. It needs to stay away, forever."

Lucifer felt the usual stab of grief, guilt and regret at the mention of Uriel's name. It was the only sin he'd ever truly regretted. He closed his eyes in shame and sadness, wanting to burn the memory out of him, but knowing that he would carry it forever, the one burden he could never remove.

Abaddon came over and put a hand on his shoulder. He cleared his throat, feeling somewhat awkward.

"No-one blames you for Uriel, you know. If you had not stopped him, he would have killed Mother and you. Everything would have been thrown into chaos. There would have been a war between Heaven and Hell, and Earth would have been caught in the crossfire. The universe would have been utterly destroyed. You stopped that from happening, and so it had to be done."

Lucifer hadn't considered that side of it, though it did nothing to diminish his guilt. He felt touched that his demonic siblings would have avenged his death, and risk Father's wrath again to fight the seraphim.

Abaddon went over to stand by Azrael, as she got up. She gave him a small nod, and then he turned back to face his brother.

"Goodbye, Lucifer. I await your return, my brother and my king," he said, the formal lilt returning to his words, bowing his head in deference. And then he unfolded his ebony wings and vanished in a swirl of black.

Azrael lingered behind, smoothing over her black dress, and then she came over and wrapped him in a hug. Lucifer was surprised; they weren't really ones for physical displays of affection. She unfolded her wings and wrapped them around the two of them, forming a shell of energy around them out of silvery, humming wisps of light.

"What are you d..?" She interrupted him, whispering quickly into his ear, "They won't be able to hear us this way." Lucifer furrowed his eyebrows in confusion.

"Who won't?" Azrael let out an urgent breath, and rapidly spoke into his ear, desperately trying to fit in as much as she could before someone noticed, willing him to understand.

"Earth isn't like Hell, Lucifer. The higher classes of angels and demons can see everything that goes on. Everything. They are always watching. We know that girl makes you vulnerable, and if we know, they do as well. Uriel knew it and almost brought the universe to its knees. She is a _weakness_."

She broke the protective cradle around them as she unfolded her wings and stepped back, ready to melt away into the shadows.

"Remember my warning."

* * *

 **A/N This was not meant to be a full out chapter - Azrael was meant to give Lucifer her warning, tell him that someone was making mischief in Hell and to tie up the loose end with her sword. But the characters all had so much to say that it took up many words. Let me know what you thought! (Btw I usually update Thursday/Friday, I'm just early today)**

 **A huge thank you to all those of you who review because it honestly lifts me up so much and encourages me to keep writing!**


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N hey guys! I am so sorry that this is late - the amount of work that I have had is unbelievable. I am drowning in essays.**

 **A huge thank you to all of you amazing people who are following, have favourited and reviewed. Reading all of your comments just brightens my day!**

* * *

Chloe hurtled down the stairs, sweeping her jacket over her shoulders, as she searched around for her keys. She was nearly in tears as she combed through the sofa for the billionth time, searching with ever-increasing frustration for those damned keys. She was breathing heavily as she tried to keep her annoyance and irritation under control. Maze was no help to her – she was sick, although Chloe doubted very much that she would have been useful even if she was well and sprightly.

Chloe didn't foresee her housemate getting better any time soon. Maze had vehemently refused to see any doctor, and was actually in denial that she was even ill. Chloe had taken one look at Maze's pallid face and sighed – she'd looked after Trixie enough times to know when someone was ill.

She hurled the cushions across the room in frustration, and they landed by the door, just as the bell rang. Chloe stomped over to the door, kicked the cushion out of the way, and flung the door open, expecting to see Dan waving her car keys with an apologetic expression on his face. This would be the tenth time that this had happened over the past two years.

So it came as an extreme surprise to see Lucifer, dressed in a suit, leaning against the frame, with a thoughtful expression in his eyes, holding a bag of croissants in one hand and a cup of coffee in another.

He held them up. "I've brought you breakfast."

Chloe tried to pull her mouth up off the floor, and knew that Lucifer was sniggering internally at the baffled expression on her face. He rolled his eyes.

"I haven't got all century, Detective. Take the goods I am offering, and I can give you a lift to work."

Chloe stared for a few more seconds, and then gathered her wits about her, and dashed off to get her things. This was too much of a fortuitous occurrence to just let slip though her fingers. Lucifer stepped in the house, looking about him with a mild interest - this was the only human home that he'd actually ever entered. It was obvious that a child lived here: pictures and drawing pinned to walls, toys and games dumped in a corner, and in random places. He was especially enjoying the barbie doll stuffed headfirst into the fruit bowl, though he rather suspected that was Maze's touch as opposed to Trixie's.

Chloe came back, looking a little more composed than she had been when she yanked open the door earlier.

"Where's Maze?" he asked, curiously. His henchwoman was nowhere in sight.

"She's come down with some sort of fever. She's in her room." Chloe replied, digging into the pastry. They tasted heavenly, and before long she had wolfed down two of them.

Lucifer, in the meanwhile, was _extremely_ confused.

"She's ill?" He looked at her with his eyebrows raised in disbelief. "We are talking about the same Maze, aren't we, Detective? The Maze I know doesn't get ill."

"Everyone gets ill, Lucifer, and Maze is no exception. She's got a fever, and has barely enough energy to walk around," Chloe told him. It had unnerved her to see Maze so feeble, but accepted that everyone had their down days. Even badass bounty hunters who claimed to be demons.

He blanched. He moved towards the staircase, and climbed up them two steps at a time, almost running to Maze's room. He banged on the door.

"Maze?" he shouted.

"Go away," a voice croaked.

He swung open the door, and the sight that met his eyes completely threw him. Maze, his chief torturer, born and raised among the fires of Hell, bounty-hunter extraordinaire, was sick. He was utterly nonplussed.

 _Demons don't get ill_ , he thought.

The fearful look he saw when he looked into her eyes was seemed to reply, _I know._

She looked awful. Drained of the vitality that usually radiated off from her, and lacking in the energy that she usually emanated made her seem like a completely different person. Her skin looked haggard, and there was a greyish tinge to the brown complexion, and her hair was fanned out dank and limp on the pillow.

She looked weak. She looked vulnerable. And neither Lucifer nor Maze liked it.

"I… I… don't understand," he said. "How has this happened."

Maze shook her head as if to say, _no clue buddy_.

"Maze is going to be fine, Lucifer," Chloe assured him, after seeing the flabbergasted look on his face. "I checked her temperature all night. Her fever is coming down, and she will be on the path to recovery very soon. She will get better, trust me. As long as she drinks and eats everything I've prepared for her, she'll be up and kicking in no time at all." The bedside table was cluttered with thermos flasks filled with steaming soup and food for her to eat if she felt peckish, though Chloe severely doubted that she would be able to swallow anything anytime soon.

Lucifer didn't understand what was going on. _Maybe her time on earth was changing her_ , he thought. Maybe she was becoming human? He'd noticed her unusual attachment to the Detective's offspring, and the sudden thirst to get a job and fit in to the human world. He'd noted her increasing mundane-ness with some amusement. He'd never have imagined that it would have a physical effect on her.

He would have to go and see Amenadiel later. Ask him for advice.

 _Well_ , he thought wryly, _that's something to look forward to._

He nodded distractedly at the detective's words and let himself be herded out of the room, still stunned.

Chloe wasn't sure she really wanted Lucifer to be driving. He seemed to be in a state of shock. Chloe wondered why he was so distraught. Yes, Maze was his close friend, but it wasn't as if she was dying or anything. Hadn't he seen anyone ill before?

 _Then again_ , she reminded herself, _this is Lucifer._ In whichever way you'd think he'd react, he'd do the completely opposite thing which was usually what you least expected. She placed a hand gingerly on his back, hoping he'd see it as a gesture or comfort.

"She will be fine, Lucifer," she said. "Trust me."

He turned to look at her and smiled softly, saying, "I hope she does. We should get going."

As he pulled away and walked away from her, Chloe realised, with some shock, that her hand had been right where she'd seen his scars to be, when she had stumbled upon him unawares that day. She had touched the gnarled skin, callous and rough like the face of a cliff would be after a storm had sent the rocks crumbling into the depths below, before he'd gripped her hands and looked at her with those pleading eyes.

But now, she hadn't felt anything but smooth skin under the fabric of his shirt and suit. Surely, if the scars she remembered were still there, then there would be some sort of texture or depression.

Her hand dropped to her side as she watched him walk down the steps and get ready to leave. It was Chloe's turn to look stricken now.

His scars had disappeared.

 _Don't be silly_ , a voice said in her mind. _You probably couldn't feel anything underneath all the fabric he was wearing._

 _But those scars were deep_ , reminded another part. _You would have been able to feel them through a woollen jumper._

"Detective, get a move on!"

As she finally left her house, she decided that she would settle this once and for all. She would tell her fantastical mind and overactive imagination that Lucifer did _not_ have wings and that his scars hadn't magically vanished.

She had to see him shirtless.

Again.

 _Well, this should be fun._

###

The pair walked into the precinct laughing at a joke Lucifer had just made, with Chloe rolling her eyes as usual.

"Ah, Sir Douche," said Lucifer, pinching Dan's cheek playfully, "how are we this fine morning?"

Dan batted his hand away and replied, "Good, thanks."

"I would say that's good to hear, but then I'd be lying. I merely wanted the opportunity to greet you as Sir Douche." Lucifer smiled brightly before walking off.

Chloe rolled her eyes. "Do you have my keys, Dan?"

He shook his head. "How did you get here then?"

"Lucifer dropped me. And about yesterday's case..." Chloe ploughed into the conversation about any identification of the bodies.

Lucifer was wondering, in the meanwhile, what had actually _possessed_ him to buy the detective breakfast, turn up to her house and offer to drop her to work. The notion of giving favours to people without them actually asking for it was a foreign one to him, but he had come to accept that that the Detective was the exception to all of his rules.

Azrael had wanted his to distance himself from the detective. Dad knew how many times he'd tried to. He had tried everything to make him hate Chloe, to make Chloe hate him. He'd even organised a fake wedding to let her believe that he didn't care about her. Yet, despite everything, she was here at his side.

He couldn't let her go. Try as he might, they were bound together.

And even if he could stop caring about her, he wouldn't have wanted to.

Since meeting the mystery that went by the name of Chloe Jane Decker, he'd woken up to the start of each day with a fresh sense of excitement. For the first time in millennia, he had looked forward to the day with a sense of wonder as to what it would bring and the adventures he would go on.

He knew he was weakened because of her. He'd killed his brother to save her life.

Azrael wanted to preserve the balance of the universe. But if Chloe would bring down the balance of the cosmos because of his connection to her, then so be it. His Father was the one that put her in the first place. The irony of ironies would be that his intervention to try and control Lucifer's life would be creation's downfall.

Lucifer hated the thought that if he was around Chloe he was acquiescing to his Father's plan. But he couldn't let her go. And not for the first time and certainly not for the last time, he cursed his divine Father's name. Lucifer was not going to change anything to save the universe. The fate of the world could go and do something that was anatomically impossible with itself.

###

"Right so we have Cora Stone, meteorologist, 29, who has allegedly killed Mason Heathcote, 55, and has then killed herself." Chloe gestured to the screen in the boardroom, displaying images of the two victims. Charlotte made a sound of disgust at seeing the photos of the corpses. Ella patted her shoulder. Lucifer was lounging in the chair as usual, with his feet laced rebelliously on the desk, and grimaced, while Dan was flipping through the records.

"Any link between the two?" asked Charlotte.

"None whatsoever. They're incompletely different circles, completely different walks of life. We've found nothing so far and it's unlikely that we will, but we are still searching," said Chloe.

Ella frowned. "Well we ran the DNA test to see if it was Cora who struggled with Mason, and the test results were positive. Have their families been informed?" she asked.

"That's the thing. They don't have any. Mason retired early, having made his fortune in shipping, and, from what we can gather, was a churchgoing bachelor. Didn't marry, no siblings." Chloe always felt the worst when there was no one to tell. It was hard to break the news to their families, but at least the dead person would have someone who cared about their loss. It made her angry to think that Mason might of been targeted because of his isolation, because there was no one to cry for him at his burial.

"The man was wealthy. He made several donations to church and bequeathed his wealth to various missions and charities, but we don't think that money was the motive here," explained Dan.

Lucifer rolled his eyes. He was dealing with one of his fathers obsequious humans. "And the girl? Cora?" he asked.

"Same story. Parents died a few years ago in an accident. She lives alone in an apartment. No siblings, no boyfriend. She wasn't particularly rich and has no social media at all whatsoever," Chloe said. Strange, Lucifer thought. Humans her age were broadcasting anything and everything these days. Not that he was complaining - it made tracking them down just that much easier for him and Chloe.

"We contacted her colleagues and the landowner, asked them what they knew, and apparently she is a pretty private individual, very shy, and seems nice for what they knew."

"And the tattoo?" Lucifer asked, unable to keep his curiosity down any longer. At this point, it didn't seem as if the murders were specifically targeted at him, but he had to make sure.

"No matches to any gang symbols in LA. You have lots of snakes in tags and things but we haven't found anything with wings, or quite that much detailing," supplied Dan.

"Are you sure you've looked?" he asked. Chloe thought she could detect a note of fear or uncertainty in Lucifer's voice. She raised her eyebrows.

"They ran the search all night on the database and the Internet. Zilch," said Ella.

The room was silent for a few looked worriedly at Chloe, not knowing quite what to say. They hadn't been in situations like this often, where there were absolutely no leads to follow. She shook her head, as if answering his unasked question as to what they were going to do next. She had no ideas at all. Her mind was blank.

Chloe opened her mouth to say something, but just then one of the junior recruits swung open the door, panting heavily.

"You need to see this, Detective."

* * *

 **A/N So, what's up with Maze being sick? And what is it that Detective needs to see? Let me know what you guys think!**


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N Hey everyone. Sorry for the delay yet again - I think I'm just going to change the update times to the weekends.**

 **Thank you to all of you people who have followed, favourited and reviewed - I cannot appreciate you all enough.**

 **A couple of you have mentioned that after seeing Azrael's freak-out where a section of Hell materializes around her they want to see Lucifer's demonstration of his badass powers, and to put anxious minds to rest, Lucifer's display was always going to be in the story from the get-go, and we should see it in the next chapter or the one after that.**

 **Hope everyone enjoys the chapter!**

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The woman would have been a beauty, the kind which made people turn and stare at them as they walked gracefully past. Her long, slender limbs were draped in white, expensive fabric, and soft touches of makeup enhanced the features of her angled face, and her unblemished skin was as smooth as the surface of cream.

The only thing that ruined the picture were the streams of blood that ran down from her neck. The blood had stained the front of her dress, seeping into the dusty earth, mingling with the blood of the man she had killed, whose lifeless body lay with a puncture to his heart.

Chloe thought she should be used to it by now, but her stomach always lurched when she saw the bodies. This was the fourth pair of corpses they had encountered in four days. Each day since the first, the detective would receive a call saying that two bodies had been found. A woman and a man. A woman with a self inflicted gash running across her throat, created by the same knife that had stabbed the man that would be found lying a few feet away from her. A woman with a curling dragon tattoo.

The entire precinct was utterly stupefied. These murders seemingly had no third person involved in them, yet how were these killings, too similar and too close together to be dismissed as consequence, be possible. The question pressed on Chloe's mind ceaselessly, leaving her with the burning need to find out who was behind it all, and intense passion to bring them to justice. There were a few obstacles in her plan, however.

They had no witnesses.

They had no leads.

They had no connections.

They had nothing.

Chloe looked over despairingly at Lucifer. He met her gaze, his eyes betraying no emotion. He didn't like this at all. Each day he was swamped over by a new wave of uneasiness, an unshakeable feeling that this was a portent of worse things to come. He stepped forward, making his way towards the detective.

 _Crunch_. He looked down in surprise as he removed his foot. He crouched on the ground to examine the source of the noise. It was brown, an earthy colour, and crumbled to fragments in his fingers.

There were shards of pottery everywhere around the bodies. They were easy to miss, for they were the same colour as the barren land of the crime scene.

A cold shock went through him, as if he had been doused in ice. It couldn't be.

 _He will rule them with an iron sceptre and shatter them like pottery, and I shall give him the morning star._

It was too deliberate for it not to be a coincidence. He recalled the scene from yesterday in the boardroom.

 _Chloe slammed the sheets down in exasperation. "What do you mean she isn't on the system? She's got to have some kind of identity."_

 _Dan ground his teeth. "We have searched every database, regional, national and international, and we. can't. find. her. It isn't our fault. Maybe she's undocumented."_

 _A small scream of irritation escaped from Chloe's mouth. "And the man?"_

 _"Retired," supplied Dan hastily."Wife died a few years ago, and no kids..."_

 _Chloe shut her eyes in disappointment. She had been so hopeful that there would be some kind of clue, some small scrap of information they could use._

 _"Well," cut in Ella, "I don't know if this is important, but the amount of iron in the woman's blood stream is sky high. I mean, I've never seen quantities this high in my life. It isn't lethal, but extremely unusual. Just thought you should know."_

No one had known what to make of the information.

The iron. And the pottery. It couldn't be a coincidence.

These murders were targeted at him. They were symbolic for the morning star. The name he bore.

For on the second day, the woman was found with necklace upon necklace of different stones and gems fastened around her neck, spattered with blood as they glistened in the sunlight. Lucifer had been reminded of the quoits games that humans would play at the fair, looping the rings into those wooden poles, when he had seen the woman bedecked with precious gems. They had been baffled, and assumed it was a statement of some sort. But now he wasn't sure.

 _You were in Eden,_  
 _the garden of God;_  
 _every precious stone adorned you:_  
 _carnelian, chrysolite and emerald,_  
 _topaz, onyx and jasper,_  
 _lapis lazuli, turquoise and beryl,_  
 _Your settings and mountings were made of gold;_  
 _on the day you were created they were prepared._

He was certain that someone was sending him a message.

Now he needed to find out who was behind it all.

He looked over and saw the detective's brow furrowed in confusion. Again he was overcome with the strange urge to hold her and comfort her, to soothe her and tell her that it would be alright, that they would get to the bottom of this before anyone else got hurt, and the perpetrator would be put behind bars.

But he couldn't lie.

###

Amenadiel stared at Lucifer, dumbfounded. "Are you sure? She isn't making it up or anything?"

"Ask me that one more time, brother, and we'll see how your shiny, bald head fares when a crystal decanter is smashed against it."

Amenadiel spluttered. "But I don't understand. Maze doesn't have a soul. You and I can become human and angel according to our Father's wishes, but Maze is only a corporeal form. She is made purely of demonic energy. Father has jurisdiction and power over every being in the universe, and while he could still kill her, or remove her from the universe, even he cannot alter her essence."

"No," he decided. "Maze is not ill because she's becoming human. From what you're describing, it may not even be a human sickness."

"Well?" pressed Lucifer, "what do you suspect?"

Amenadiel gazed out of the window, not meeting Lucifer's eyes.

"I can't be sure. Maybe... I don't know. I need to see her myself to see if my theory is correct," he answered vaguely.

Lucifer knew he wouldn't get anything more out of him. He threw his hands up in the air, trying to stop himself from going up to his patronising, supercilious brother and kick him viciously in the ankle. He wouldn't want to ruin his shoes after all.

"Have fun with that then," he spat out vehemently. "A word of warning; Maze may be an invalid, but I wouldn't put it past her to throttle you when you visit her. You know what they say - Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned."

Lucifer tried to lighten the mood, but he could tell that Amenadiel was suspecting something bad. And there was a pit in the bottom of his stomach that was bubbling away in anxiety like the fiery depths of the Phlegethon, the river of the underworld.

"There's something else on your mind, isn't there, Lucifer?" probed Amenadiel.

"There's a difficult case at the precinct," Lucifer said delicately. The less Amenadiel knew about the other situation on his hands, the better. He didn't need his powerless older brother to meddle in his affairs.

"Yes, with the draconian sigil, the gems and stones, the iron and the clay, it is as if someone is trying to send you a message. They seem to be Satanic allusions after all." Amenadiel had his eyebrows raised.

 _Well, that ship has sailed._

Lucifer's voice was like honey poured over shards of ice. "And, how came you by that information, brother?"

His eyes widened. "Unless _you_ were behind them, you backstabbing Judas, you jealous usurper, you…" Amenadiel cut across his tirade with an impatient, affronted air.

"You think I would murder innocent people to send you a message? Think, you little buffoon. Why would I do such a thing? It was Dan who told me of the case." Lucifer still eyed him distrustfully.

Amenadiel continued. "I must say, it's cleverly done. The symbols aren't obvious enough for the LAPD to consider any religious motivation, but they are too deliberate to be anything else."

"Who is it, then? Who challenges me?"

"I couldn't say, Lucifer. It is just as much of a mystery to me."

"You are just completely useless, brother, you know that? And don't ever call me a buffoon again." Putting as much venom into his voice as he could, Lucifer stalked off to the elevator to get back to the precinct. Amenadiel's smile from calling the lightbringer a buffoon began to fade, as he fervently hoped that the enemy he suspected was not truly resurfacing.

###

The precinct was filled with a tense hush as they frantically searched for any clues and any new leads which might lead them to the site of the next murders. To Chloe, Lucifer seemed exceptionally determined to find out who was behind the murders, sweeping through the records for any scrap of information which they could use. It was as if the case had affected him personally, but, as per Lucifer fashion, he refused to say what was troubling him. He worked like a man possessed.

The expressions of despair and futility and the resigned air that there was nothing they could do was oppressive, and Chloe couldn't stand it.

"It's going to happen again tomorrow," Lucifer voiced the thought that was running through everyone's minds, cutting through the silence.

Chloe nodded, resigned. "It's impossible to predict where it's going to be. We haven't found any connection between the places – they're all quiet, but somehow the bodies are always found."

Lucifer wasn't even listening to her. His attention had shifted to the map that had been hung up on the wall. Charlotte had suggested that maybe the murderer was moving in a pattern, but an obvious one couldn't be found, and it seemed too unlikely. Chloe reminded herself that there may not have even been a murderer. All the evidence clearly pointed to the woman in each pair being the killer, and not a third person. But all of the incidents were eerily alike to be ruled out as a coincidence. Dan had suggested drugs, but there were no traces in their systems. Chloe had thought they might have been brainwashed, but she rejected it as a plausible solution.

Lucifer brought the map down to his desk, and looked at it, deep in thought. The feeling of uncharacteristic anxiety that had been bubbling away at the pit of his stomach was reaching its unbearable climax. He recalled those prophetic verses.

 _He will rule them with an iron sceptre and shatter them….and I will give him the Morning Star_

Then, suddenly, as if he had been suddenly electrocuted, he snatched a Sharpie and began to join up the dots using a ruler.

We've tried that already, Chloe thought. The site of each murder had made an irregular looking four sided shape, but it was impossible to gauge a fifth. Chloe frowned as she looked over at Lucifer's drawing. He had drawn a star, the kind that Trixie to draw as a kid, where you followed the points of a pentagon, forming each line by joining every second vertex. Lucifer joined the dots, and then continued the line to find the fifth vertex, which had landed exactly on some lettering. As she peered over Lucifer's shoulder, she saw the minute writing spell out the name of the building. A small flicker of hope rose within her. Maybe, just maybe, this would be it…

Lucifer held up the map and read out, "Kali Restaurant and Lounge."

Chloe's spirits plummeted like a rock thrown into water. She suddenly felt exhausted, drained by the fact that they had made no progress, and sagged onto Lucifer's shoulder, letting herself be supported by his strong, grounded frame. She fought the overwhelming urged to snuggle around him and fall asleep in his arms, comforted by the fact that he wouldn't let her go.

"Detective," he sounded worried, "are you quite alright?"

Chloe pulled herself back up, and leaned against the desk.

"I don't know anymore, Lucifer. I haven't been able to crack this case, and a total of 8 people have died under mysterious circumstances in the space of four days, and we are no closer to solving this than we were on day one," she said, her voice stretched with tiredness and fatigue. "I can't find any leads, any explanation. We've checked all the records, interviewed every single person in connection with this and we haven't gone anywhere. Maybe, I'm looking at this the wrong way or I'm just not good at this or…"

Lucifer interrupted her, and looked at her with an earnest intensity in his eyes. "You have one of the highest solve rates here in the LAPD, and probably most of the country," he said gently. "Of course, I'm an invaluable asset to you," he added smugly, "but even then, you are one of the most talented, stubborn, smart…"

 _…divinely beautiful, enchanting, understanding…_

"…people I have ever met in all my life. And I have met many, many people these past millennia."

Chloe smiled sheepishly. Alright, so she wasn't immune to flattery - especially if it was coming from Lucifer looking at her with _that_ expression on his face.

"Hey guys," Dan piped up. "Just ran a search on Kali Restaurant and Lounge. It was an Indian restaurant which opened in the eighties, but it's been closed for over twenty years. The building's abandoned – no-one's been in it for decades. Apparently," he peered closer to the screen, "it's haunted."

Lucifer raised his eyebrows. Most of the time, humans just conjured things up from their imagination, but once in a while, it was an escaped soul, wreaking havoc, seeking a way to end their torment on Hell. But it all seemed to fall into place. If these murders really were targeted at him, then it would make perfect sense for this one to be the vertex of the pentagram. It was the symbol that was emblazoned on the adamantine gates that guarded Hell.

The gears in Chloe's brains were turning. Her entire body hummed with an energy that had been lacking these past four days. An abandoned building would be the perfect place for it. It seemed to fit the shape on the map, for it made a perfect pentagon, and the murders had happened in the order that the star was drawn – and they had nothing to lose now. She admitted they were clutching at straws, but better that than nothing at all.

"Make the arrangements, Dan. We stake it out tomorrow. It's the only chance we've got." She looked around for Lucifer, and found one of the recruits talking to him, gesturing wildly to her wrist. Lucifer looked at Chloe, more hopeful than she had seen him all day.

"There's someone in the lobby who wants to talk to us."

Chloe shook her head. _And?_

 _"_ He has the tattoo. He wants our help in return for information." His lips curled into a smile.

* * *

 **A/N Warning: the next chapter may contain feathers from a certain individual's wings**


	6. Chapter 6

**A/N Hey guys, here is Chapter 6. My usual thanks to all of you brilliant people who have followed, favourited and reviewed because you guys are just amazing and really inspire me to keep on writing. There is going to be a lot of action in this chapter, and certain _truths_ are confronted...**

 **Also take what I said about my updating schedule with a pinch of some finely grounded salt, because I just cannot stick to my own rules. I will try to update at least once a week, give or take a few days. That being said, I think the story should wrap up in a couple of chapters after some showdowns, unless it goes in a completely different direction than to what I had originally planned.**

 **So... Chapter 6**

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Chloe gasped when she saw him. He was beautiful. He had an almost otherworldly prettiness to his face. Long, curling lashes which caught the light when he blinked, his blue eyes fixed on the floor, while long, brown locks tickled his cheekbones which left gaunt shadows on his face. He had a darkness about him, almost as if shadows clung to him. He was all angles and shadows.

He was slender and his clothes hung off him, but somehow, managed to make him look graceful and elegant, despite his haggard appearance. The boy looked as though he had not seen food or drink for days. Immediately the mother in Chloe's heart yearned to console him, to pull him into a maternal embrace and wipe the tears that were welling in his eyes.

"Can you help me?" he whispered hoarsely, speaking with an accent she couldn't quite place. "Find her, I beg you. I'll do anything, I have money…"

Chloe interrupted him at once. "No, no, we'll help you. It's our job. You don't need to do anything except give us information. Who is the person you want to find?"

The boy closed his eyes in relief. He drew in a ragged breath.

"My sister. They have taken my sister. Please, say you will find her."

"Who has taken her…" Chloe trailed off. "I'm sorry; I don't know what your name is."

"I am called Elias. Elias Reuben." Lucifer watched the exchange with excited eyes. They were so close. By luck, this little weasel would give them everything that they needed. He would hunt down the leader of the gang, unmask their true identity, and they would face the wrath and might of the King of Hell.

"So Elias, start from the beginning. Who took your sister, and why do you have that tattoo?"

Elias closed his eyes, as if the information he was about to divulge pained him. He looked so vulnerable.

"The tattoo was given to us when we joined a brotherhood. You would call it a gang, but it was so much more than that." A dreamy look began to cross the boy's face, as though he was remembering something sweet. Nostalgia.

"We were on the streets at that time. I… we… our father banished us. He threw us out without a penny. We needed a place to live, a job, money. They gave us that. They protected us. They were like my brothers and sisters."

Lucifer at once felt a strong sense of understanding with the boy. He knew what it was to be spurned from your home, to be exiled with the door of your house locked at your back.

"And the killings?" pressed Chloe.

"I don't know a lot about them. I wasn't involved with the upper levels. They took a few girls a couple of days back, said they needed them for some special assignment. This was normal, you see, we do small jobs as part of the gang. My sister, she went with them. I didn't think anything was wrong."

"And…," prompted Lucifer, "…what happened?"

"The girls they took – four of them are dead. Cora, Leah, Isabelle, Mariam." Chloe's eyes widened. The first two names she recognised as belonging to the first two women they had found.

"They only took five girls. My sister is next. Elena." Elias clenched his fists. "I wanted to see the people in the higher ranks. But they didn't let me." He began to shake, with huge, wracking sobs heaving his body.

"She was going to do her exams next month, and graduate. Cora was getting a promotion in her meteorology job. Isabelle and Mariam were full-time members, and…"

"What happened next?" said Lucifer quickly, unable to stay patient any longer. Elias stopped crying.

"I realized they were dead when I saw their bodies in the newspapers, when I didn't hear anything from them. I tried to find out what was going on. I don't know who is responsible for their deaths, our clan or another one. Some are saying it was an act of vengeance, but I don't know. No-one was telling me anything. They refused to say."

Chloe narrowed her eyes despite her longing to comfort the boy.

"So you don't know why they were killed."

"I know nothing!" he cried. "I am a lowly member of the clan. My sister was innocent. She did nothing wrong. I don't understand any of it. Please, if there is a chance that my sister is still alive, say that you will rescue her. I… was on patrol last night. I… I… had access to the office. I grabbed whatever I could see. My sister is the only link I have left – I would even betray them to save her. I looked at it, but I cannot understand it. Perhaps it will help you…"

He hoisted the bag onto the table. It was crammed full of sheets, maps, transactions and account details. Chloe rifled through the maps, until she found the one that she was looking for, with a five pointed star drawn on it. The various tips were assigned to different numbers, which matched up with the order that the murders had happened in.

"You were right, Lucifer," breathed Chloe. For the number 5 was scrawled next to the words of Kali Restaurant and Lounge.

"It means something to you?" asked Elias. "Then you _can_ save her." His eyes lit up with relief, and it transformed his face.

Lucifer, however, was transfixed on one of the folder covers. It was a plain brown paper file, but stamped on the front was a dragon eating its own tail – the inked tattoo that was found on the victims. Inside the circle in block red capitals, there was spelled out,

PANDAEMONIUM

Lucifer's hand started to tremble. He tried to steel himself.

"Yes," said Elias, "The name of my former brotherhood. I can never return now." He bowed his head. "But they took my sister, and I care about her more than anything. That is what I used to be part of."

 _Yes, and it's also my capital city,_ thought Lucifer.

"The leader of your gang," said Lucifer, "What's his name? Do you know who he is."

Elias looked at him. "Our leader is a woman. Not much else is known about her. None of the lower levels ever get to see her. But, among our ranks, she is known only as the lady."

"You call her lady?" asked Chloe incredulously.

"The lady," he corrected, a little too quickly for Lucifer's liking.

Lucifer immediately became suspicious. Why is it that suddenly, this boy walks in and hands everything they needed to know on a silver platter? There was no such thing as a free lunch – Lucifer should know this. He invented favours after all - it was an eye for an eye. He shook his head and gazed at the boy suspiciously as he realized that all this was too good to be true. He was surprised the Detective hadn't thought of it earlier – for she was even more cynical that he was – but then he realized that Chloe was looking at Elias the way one might look at an injured puppy. She felt sorry for him.

Lucifer stretched out his hand, in the blink of an eye, and gripped Elias's face. He bored into him with his eyes, willing him, coaxing him, easing out his deepest want, greatest wish.

"What is it, Elias, that you truly desire?"

Elias's piercing eyes glazed over, and became unfocused. He struggled, and hesitated, trying to resist Lucifer's tantalizing pull.

"I want to make my family happy. I want my mother to be proud of me," he whispered, as though tiny hooks were pulling the truth out of him as he resisted.

Lucifer, somewhat dissatisfied with his answer, dropped his hold on him. What he was saying seemed to ring true after all.

"Lucifer," snapped Chloe reproachfully, "Why did you do that to him? He looks as though he's going to drop to his feet."

The intensity of her gaze surprised him. Chloe, realizing this, shook her head, as if she was clearing it of a daze, and said, "We need the stakeout to be successful tomorrow."

Lucifer agreed with her. Tomorrow, they would save the girl and her intended victim and finally discover who was behind it all.

###

Lucifer picked his way through the ruins, with Chloe not far ahead. The whole place was rotting with the stench of decay, the walls and ceiling crumbling into disrepair. He could envisage the grandeur that must have stood here, and almost as if he was peeling away the outer surface of dingy dereliction, he could imagine the magnificent furnishings that would have adorned the room, the chandeliers glittering away as the voices of chatter and laughter filled the room. He could hear the echoes of bygone days, and make out the people like ghosts, imparted into the very fabric of the room.

But the glamour soon vanished, as he followed the detective, his heart full of trepidation.

"If the killer follows their pattern, then they should be arriving soon. Ella always estimated each of the murders to be between 3 and 4," Chloe informed him, mostly for her own benefit. They'd both been drilled infinite times about the details of the case.

As she stood there, gazing at her decadent surroundings, she doubted herself yet again. Last night, it had seemed as if they were finally one step ahead, but now, she wasn't sure if it was such a good idea. They had been clutching at straws, and had the boy had not turned up and given the information, she would've woken up today dismissing the idea that the star would have guided them to the right spot. But even then, it seemed too perfect. What if they were in the completely wrong place?

Focus, she chastised herself. Even if they were miles off the mark, it was better to have tried to prevent it than to be sitting in her office, waiting for the phone to ring, a death knell announcing someone else's sordid fate.

"Do you think this is it, Detective?" he asked her. Chloe heaved a breath.

"I don't know, Lucifer. I hope it is. But at least we tried," she said. She looked into his eyes, seeking comfort and solace, drawing her confidence from knowing that he was here. "We've done this before Lucifer, and we've always made it through," she reassured him.

Lucifer cocked a confident grin. "And we will today." He nodded at her, and they resumed sweeping through the rooms.

A laugh, deep and sinister, as fleeting as it was mysterious, echoed throughout the room. Chloe's heart started to hammer painfully in her chest. This was it. They were finally going to get to the bottom of this. Bursting with nervous anticipation, she quietly slid her gun out of the holster, and motioned to Lucifer to stay put, as she inched towards the door from where the laugh come from.

That was utter silence.

She stretched a hand out, and grabbed the door handle. Preparing herself, she took in a deep breath, and pushed.

The door swung open with the protesting creak into a tiny room no larger than a store cupboard.

The sight that greeted her sent her heart plummeting down to her feet. Her eyes widened.

 _No! No, anything but this._

Her instinct had been right all along. This had been a trap.

For in front of her, blinking red numbers were counting down to zero.

It was a bomb.

 _Seven seconds…_

She turned around to Lucifer, knowing there was nothing she could do. Unshed tears swam in her eyes; time seemed to dilate. She couldn't hear anything or feel anything or sense anything. All she could see through her blurry vision was Lucifer hurtling towards her, crushing her body against his, holding her as if he would never let go, his warmth radiating through his clothes.

 _Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to die like this after all._

 _But I didn't say goodbye to Trixie._

She wrapped her arms around him fiercely, just as the bomb rips through the atmosphere. She saw raining fire.

And then she saw nothing at all.

###

Lucifer couldn't see anything. It was pitch black. He could feel the rubble weighing down on his back as he tried to move.

"Chloe," he whispered. "Wake up!" His heart clenched in terrible fear at the thought that maybe she hadn't made it. "Chloe, please..."

She stirred, and her eyes fluttered open. She could see nothing. All she could feel was Lucifer's body covering her own, and the thrum of his heart as it pulsed on her body.

"Are we dead?" she asked groggily. Lucifer chuckled, relief flooding through him.

"I don't think so, Detective. Not unless Father gets a concussion and allows me into heaven, because I'm sure that you aren't going to Hell. It's much louder than this down there, I'm afraid."

"I don't understand. How are we still alive?" She asked. She wriggled around from underneath him, trying to loosen her arms, trying to get some purchase on the floor beneath her, when her fingers brushed upon something soft, and feathery.

"Are these feathers?" Chloe was wide awake now. She began to struggle, panicking. "What's going on? I remember the bomb... and then you, and then...and the…"

"Detective, do you trust me?" he cut in.

She paused a few seconds, trying to make sense of it all, trying to process everything that had happened.

"Yes," she said simply. "Of course I do." Lucifer shifted his body slightly, figuring out what to do.

"I need you to try and hook your arms around my waist, alright. And then, on three, I need you to push yourself off the ground and pull towards me."

"What are you going to do, Lucifer? I don't understand."

"I'm going to get you out of here. Save the questions for later, Chloe, and do as I say!" he grunted. Those rocks were heavy, on his back, not to mention agonisingly painful. "I'm going to get you out of here, I promise you." The tone in his voice was unmistakably earnest and sincere, and Chloe knew that Lucifer didn't ever break his promises.

Chloe nodded slightly. She snaked her hands slowly around his waist, wincing with the effort it took her.

"One,..." Lucifer began to lift himself up, so that there were a few inches between them. A faint, white glow slowly appeared, softly illuminating his face. It cast a pearly, luminescent sheen, but there weren't any light sources around. Chloe decided that she didn't care where it had come from, and even if she was seeing things, the light gave her comfort, and calmed down her hammering heart.

"Two..." She tightened her grip, around him, readying herself to pull up...

"Three!" And suddenly, his arms were around her, yanking her up from the floor, his wings unfurling the way a horse would rear on its legs, flinging the rubble that had piled up among them backwards. His white, glowing wings were outstretched, magnificent, majestic, as though God had crafted each feather individually, so beautiful it could only have been by design.

Chloe gaped at them, speechless. They were beautiful. They were divine. They were also attached to Lucifer, who was covered in blood. She realised how she hadn't died from the blast that should have killed her. Lucifer had used his wings as a kind of shield, wrapping around both of them to protect them from the explosion.

"You... have wings. Y..you have wings." She heaved, in and out, trying to breathe in some air, trying to come face to face with reality. They still hadn't let go of each other, and were intertwined in each other's arms.

"You aren't going to faint again, are you?" he asked uncertainly.

 _Again_?

"I knew it. I've seen them before! Lucifer, I thought I was going insane. I was going to take a personal day. I..." She gasped as the realisation sunk in.

"You were telling the truth all along. You are the Devil." She looked into his eyes questioningly. You really are the son of God?"

Before he could reply, the ground beneath them seemed to lurch, and puffs of powdered rock began to sift down from the ceiling.

"We need to get out of here," said Lucifer, his voice urgent, "now."

He clutched Chloe again, and tried to ignore the pain in his shoulders, as he flapped his wings and flew sideways out of the building, through the massive arches where the windows once were.

"I'm flying," whispered Chloe wondrously. "I'm like Lois Lane and you are Superman."

"Who?" asked Lucifer as he set her down in the parking lot, with a soft thud. He dismissed her question and spoke with an urgent, worried tone to his voice. "We have to get back to the precinct. We need to have a little _chat_ with Elias. Where's the back-up?" He folded up his wings, looking around him. He needed to get the detective to safety, while he went on a little hunt, that would end up with the perpetrator burning in the pits of Hell. Or to be ironic, Lucifer could put him in Cocytus, the frozen lake, more commonly known as the ninth circle of Hell.

"They should be on their way." Chloe thought that he was diverting away from the important matter at hand. It was incomprehensible, yet it made perfect sense.

"You're an _angel_."

"We can discuss this later, alright, Detective," urged Lucifer, level with her eyes, and stroking the hair back away from her face. "Right now, you need to get away from here and to somewhere where its safe, and I need to find..." ... _and punish..._ he added mentally, "...whoever planted that bomb."

Chloe nodded again, understanding, and she reached for her phone to make the calls.

"Lucifer, can you hear that? It sounds as though someone was..."

Screaming reached their ears. It came from above. Chloe looked stricken as her eyes scanned the building above them, trying to catch a glimpse of the trapped person.

"There's someone in the building. How do we..."

She trailed off as Lucifer's wings rematerialised behind him, and he swept upwards, looking for the source of the screams.

He neared the top of the building, and he heard the laugh again, the one that they had heard before, sinister and mocking, a woman's seductive laugh. He knew something was wrong. It had been a distraction. Which meant that Chloe….

He shot back towards the ground, calling her name, screaming it...

The place which he had left mere moments ago was empty.

She was gone.

* * *

 **A/N Ooooh - I said that there would be feathers! So what happened to Chloe? Where did she go? And who _is_ behind those murders?**

 **Also, I realised that I haven't been doing any disclaimers - I personally didn't think they were necessary as I thought the whole point of fanfiction is to create a story based off on and** _inspired_ **by other people's creative and literary/tv/movie genius, and that it was obvious that I don't own anything but the story. However, I am reiterating (just in case), and this applies to every single chapter that I have written and will write, that I solely own the plot of this story and nothing else, and the characters and universe that has been created is due to the creativity and imagination of Neil Gaiman and all the other brilliant screenwriters at Fox and Tom Kapinos etc. I have also drawn inspiration and taken quotes from the Bible and _Paradise Lost_ (for my Satanic references) - I mean, I did drop John Milton's name in Chapter 3 to emphasise that (teehee). Just to let y'all know :)**


	7. Chapter 7

**A/N Hey guys. I realise that this is an entire week late but I had my final exams come up and since I'd been studying for three years for them, I thought it best not to scupper it in the last few days. I am so sorry for the dreadful delay, especially after that last cliffhanger.**

 **In other news, I have reached OVER 100 followers and over 60 favourites! As I write, I have exactly 111 followers and that number is just so satisfying. I honestly thought I'd never get this far, and all of your support, especially the amazing reviewers, just keep spurring me on to write.**

 **ALSO I HAVE CAUGHT UP ON THE LAST FEW EPISODES OF SEASON THREE AND WHAT IN THE NINE CIRCLES OF HELL!**

 **I don't want to include any spoilers or waste any of your time, so I'm continuing my note/rant at the end of the chapter.**

 **I introduce to you...Chapter 7**

* * *

Amenadiel tapped gently on Maze's door, slightly nervous. On one hand, he was afraid that Maze would try her damnedest to try and hurt him and make him pay for his "supposed" betrayal with Linda – and in his human form he would be powerless to stop her – but on the other hand, he was afraid that Maze hadn't come down with a human sickness at all, but was incapacitated because someone _else_ had caused her to be that way.

He needn't have worried about his first concern, because he took one look at her pallid, clammy face and knew that she wouldn't be able to walk one step without falling flat on her face. However, the knot at the base of his stomach tightened when he realized that his second fear was true.

"Amenadiel?" There was no hostility in Maze's voice. Only puzzlement, as well as what Amenadiel could have sworn was a small tinge of relief.

Amenadiel was floored. He'd never seen anyone look so vulnerable, except maybe Lucifer, and the last person he'd have expected to look so forlorn and pitiful was the warrior Maze. He crossed the floor, and sat by her on the bed, and reached for her hand.

 _What in Father's name…?_

His hand had gone _through_ hers.

Her very existence was flickering.

" _No_! Maze! Maze, listen to me. No, don't close your eyes." Amenadiel had to keep her awake. He scrabbled around in his mind frantically, trying to remember any scrap of information that would help. His desperate pleas were working slightly – he could hold her hand now. "Maze, speak to me."

She looked as though the very effort of being alive was too much for her to bear. She looked at him forlornly, and her breath rattled, as if each one was costing more and more of her waning strength.

"What do you want me to talk about?" she whispered slowly, her lips barely moving.

He fished around for a topic in his head, anything that would help her stay conscious. "Tell me about your happiest memories." Maze simply looked at him, expressionless. Amenadiel was surprised at the topic he had chosen, and then realized that Maze hated his guts, and was probably about to spurn him and tell him to go away in foul language.

Instead she closed her eyes, and took in a few deep breaths. Suddenly, she started speaking to him about her memories in Hell, her training, her achievements, but the topics that populated most of her tale has happened right here on earth. She spoke, delirious, as if she had forgotten that Amenadiel was there, continuously, sometimes incoherent, about her times with Trixie, Chloe, Ella and Linda.

As she kept speaking, she became more and more awake, and seemed to solidify. She had gained some colour to her face, and her eyes were lit sparks of the old flames that usually burned. After a few moments of silence, Maze covered Amenadiel's hand with her own, in a gesture of offered friendship. Amenadiel sensed that, although she may not have said the words, there was no more enmity between them. For now at least.

At that moment, Lucifer clattered into the room, his shirt stained with blood, hair powdered brown with dust and grounded rubble, his clothes ripped and in tatters. But worse than the state of his hair and clothes, was the look on his face. It was blanched, with his eyes dilated, containing something that looked like a mix between pain, anger and fear. Amenadiel sprang to his feet, and Maze sat bolt upright, despite her lethargy, at seeing him like this.

 _No_ , thought Amenadiel, _**this**_ _is the worst I've ever seen someone_.

"They've taken her, Amenadiel," said Lucifer, with all the possible tragedy and sorrow packed into those words.

 _What? Who?_ "You're going to have to be more specific." His own heart was thumping painfully in his chest. "Start from the beginning." And so Lucifer rapidly told the two of them everything, unable to keep the desperation out from his voice. He cursed himself for being so stupid, for leaving Chloe all alone while he tried to act the hero...

After he had told them what had transpired with the bomb, Amenadiel and Maze exchanged significant looks with each other. Lucifer did not miss it. His breath hitched in his throat, as he looked at them with disbelief.

"You know who it is, Amenadiel, don't you? It's the person whom you suspected, isn't it?" asked Lucifer, hope and some suspicion colouring his voice.

They were silent.

" _Well_ ," he demanded, the blood beginning to boil in his veins, "why didn't you tell me who it is?"

His older brother had the decency to look ashamed as he cast his eyes to the floor. "Father forbade us from ever speaking her name, or of her again," Amenadiel admitted, as though the confession pained him.

Scoffing in disgust, he turned to Maze. She shook her head before he could ask. "She's the one that did this to me. She holds power over me, Lucifer - if I spoke her name it would alert her to my knowledge. We can't tell you," she said, "but we _can_ lead you to her identity."

"Think, Lucifer, think," Amenadiel urged, trying to get Lucifer to understand his enemy, "who alone has power over demons like Maze in that they can reduce their consciousness, drain them of their vitality."

"I don't know!" he shouted vehemently. His mind was too full of Chloe to think straight. He hoped that she wasn't hurt. He hoped that she was still... No, he couldn't let himself think that.

"Who robbed you of your powers, Lucifer?" asked Maze.

"My father...and? I don't see what this has to do with whoever's taken Chloe!"

Maze fought the urge to slap him across the face.

"Lucifer, shut up, and _listen_. Your father took away your powers, so who do you think took mine?"

"You don't have a father..." He trailed off as he finally understood. Amenadiel could almost see the lightbulb sparking in his brain.

Lucifer had gone deathly pale.

"It's not _her_ , is it?" he asked, his voice wavering slightly, wishing that Amenadiel would deny it even as he knew it was true. It made sense. Everything was finally beginning to slot into place. The knowledge crashed down upon him heavier than the rubble that had pressed down on his wings.

"If we are talking about one of the humans that Father himself ever created, who has, perhaps, since then, _lost_ her humanity, then we are talking about the same person," spoke Amenadiel slowly, trying to reveal as much as he could without going back on his oath to his Father. "And she is quite a formidable enemy."

"So -"

"Don't say her name," hissed Maze in warning, "or do you want her to know that you're onto her?"

Thunder was crashing in Lucifer's ears. He had never felt this much ... sheer _rage_ in his life. There was a fire within him that was roaring inside, which he wanted to unleash, to destroy, to bring everything crumbling down so he could dig Chloe out of the ashes.

"She has taken her," his voice eerily calm. It reminded Amenadiel of the deceptive sheen of ice on a lake - the frozen surface, which you'd thought was solid, would easily crumble into the swirling, raging depths below, sucking you into it as you flailed helplessly.

"She is going to be _punished_."

###

Chloe's heart twisted in terrible, terrible fear when she saw the figure walking towards her. The woman seemed to emanate an aura that was bitter and evil, as dark and malicious as her glittering black eyes.

Chloe backed up slightly. "I don't understand," she whispered. "Who are you?"

And the woman laughed, a loud and haughty laugh that was as chilling as it was terrible.

"Mortals," she said with absolute contempt. "You are so _stupid_." She gazed at Chloe's kneeling form, her eyes burning with pure and utter disdain.

"You believed that pathetic story about a young man who wanted to save his little sister," she taunted. Chloe felt as though she had been slapped. This woman was connected to the case? Her head was pounding with the blow it had taken as she was knocked unconscious, and struggled to formulate clear thoughts. The last thing she remembered before waking up in the cold room with only shafts of light illuminating the darkness, was the sight of Lucifer soaring upwards, with his wings outstretched, and then everything was blackness.

"Didn't it once cross your wretched little mind as suspicious that he just happened to approach you just when you needed information, carrying everything you happened to so urgently need? Didn't it ever strike you as too good to be true? The little grunt who just managed to get into the headquarters of an infamous gang, Pandaemonium."

She laughed, as she drew back. "I do hope Lucifer appreciated the touch."

At the mention of his name from the woman's lips, Chloe's stomach lurched. She hoped he was safe. And she hoped that he wasn't going to do anything stupid.

Chloe decided to try and get more information. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"No, there's quite a lot you don't." She paused.

"I do admire you, human. I wouldn't be able to live with all of those half-truths Lucifer's spun for you." The woman cocked her head to the side, questioning her mockingly, "Do you enjoy being kept in the dark? Do you enjoy knowing that he'll never love you, not matter how much you pine away for him?"

Chloe felt as though the air had been snatched out of her lungs. How did she know about her and Lucifer?

She whipped her head around as she heard an ominous creak, when the door swung open and a young man slunk through. Her eyes widened in shock. _No_.

It was Elias - the boy who'd lost his sister and has begged her with such desperation in his eyes for her to help him. He leered at her mockingly, before his skin morphed into charcoal black and vapours drifted away from him, as if he was truly made of shadows.

She gasped in horror. This couldn't be real. She pinched herself with her bound hands. But then, as she had just found out, this was a world where angels and demons existed, where there was a whole new world that was hidden in the shadows of the mundane one that she thought she knew.

Her oppressor smiled. "You have done well, my son."

 _Son_?

She thought back to the boy's deepest wish. She snorted mentally. So even demons wanted to make their mommies proud. Suddenly, the clench of fear wasn't so tight in her chest anymore and her breathing loosened slightly. The demon kneeled at his mother's feet, kissing her robes, and dissipated into the atmosphere.

The woman whipped her head around to stare at Chloe. Gone was the expression of invulnerable composure. On her face was painted unmistakeable hatred. "I have waited too long to be thwarted by a puny little mortal like you," she snarled into her ear, feral. Dragging her to the middle of the floor, she flung her on the cold, black marble, which had been etched with criss-crossing lines, interspersed with symbols and runes and marks. Chloe could sense, somehow, the power that was radiating from them.

"When you escaped the bomb," explained the woman, who was kneeling on the ground beside Chloe and finishing the intricate pattern along the floor, "I admit, I was dejected. I wanted you dead, gone forever," she said as she dragged the sharpened silver rod even more viciously along the floor. "But then, I realised that perhaps, my failure was actually a gift. _You_ were the gift."

Now that Chloe had moved into the light, she could see the room and her oppressor much better. The woman had a slender, elegant face, just like Elias's had been. Cruel intelligence was somehow visible on it, and though her skin seemed unblemished by age and suffering, her beetle-black eyes seemed heavy. Not to mention they were filled with pure malice. She wore a loosely fitted robe, and looked as though she was a classical statue come to life - although no artist could have ever captured the live, brimming rage that was within the tunnels of her eyes.

"You," she spat. "The creation of God himself. Your blood holds power, mortal. You, who can resist the charms of the devil, who makes him bleed, will be my strength."

 _What? You're insane_ , screamed Chloe internally.

The woman had stopped moving. Chloe could hear her heart hammering in her chest. The stillness unnerved her. It was like when an animal waited quietly, those few seconds of silence, just before it pounced onto its prey and gouged out its life.

"I can smell the stench of your fear," the woman whispered, in a mocking sing-song rhythm, breathing quickly in shallow breaths. She turned to look into Chloe's eyes, and slowly crawled towards her on all fours. She looked at Chloe searchingly, as if she was trying to understand something which confused her."I don't know what he saw in you. You would have made an unworthy mate," she hissed. Her face was oppressively close to Chloe's.

"WHY DOES HE WANT YOU?" she screamed. She screamed as though she was being tortured, as if someone had stuck a knife in her ribs, and was twisting it slowly, and yanking it out and stabbing it back into the same place. Chloe looked at her in disbelief, shaking her head. The woman's pain was raw; raw and real. How did she know Lucifer? And why was she obsessed with him?

Chloe's heart clenched in fear again, not for fear of her own fate, but because she was scared about what would happen to Lucifer. She eyed the bejeweled dagger that hung off the woman's waist. The raven-haired woman caught sight of Chloe's eyes lingering on the weapon. She laughed as she sat back, her earlier fit of madness gone, and brought the blade out of its sheath, caressing the wickedly sharp edge with her bony, skeletal fingers.

"Oh no, don't worry, my dear. I'm not going to kill you just yet. No, harnessing another's power requires a complex ritual which requires a lot of preparation. But be sure of this – you will die before the sun rises, and by my hand. Your blood will water these stones at midnight tonight."

Chloe closed her eyes, trying not to betray the intense sense of fear that was pumping through her veins. She felt the woman toying mockingly with a strand of her hair, and tried not to recoil from the feel of her cold breath on her face.

"I do wonder who makes such absurd rules," she asked with a questioning tone to her voice. "It shouldn't make a difference whether I kill you at midnight or eleven-thirty. Still, I'd better not risk it. It isn't every day you come across another human put on earth by the Ancient One himself." She began to move away, the edge of the knife scraping along the floor.

The sound triggered something in Chloe and something snapped within her. She was going to die. She was going to be murdered because this woman hated her. Because a woman she'd never met before loathed her very existence because of her connection to Lucifer. "I haven't done anything to you," screamed Chloe, the words spilling out of her mouth before she even knew what she was saying. "I don't know what you know about me and Lucifer, or how he knows you or that you want him. I don't _have_ any magical powers" – at this the woman opposite gave a derisive snort –"and I am a completely ordinary mom with a young daughter who needs me-" Her kidnapper made a sound of bitter hatred at this fact.

"Please," continued Chloe weakly, whispering now, "I haven't done anything to you, and if I have I am so sorry. Please... _Please -_ I…I don't even know who you are."

At this, the woman tossed her hair and laughed. "I have been hailed many things over these millennia. Mother of Demons, Queen of Darkness, the Monster of the Night, to name but a few."

"But in your tongue, I believe they call me Lilith."

* * *

 **A/N Aha! The evil mastermind has been revealed. Big showdowns and more revelations coming right up! Please tell me what you thought of the chapter, and whether you predicted it, and what you think is going to happen next.**

 **[DO NOT READ ANY FURTHER IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN SEASON 3 FINALE - MAJOR SPOILERS]**

 **They cancelled it? Right after the revelation? WHAT THE HELL? This is awful. I am devastated. I am _heartbroken_. Although I was delighted to see the knife protruding from Cain's chest - funny how I sort of predicted it (my author's note in chapter 1).**

 **Speaking of predictions, when I saw the last episode, Chloe finds out Lucifer's secret when he uses the wings to shield her - JUST LIKE MY STORY - but in mine he saves her from a ton of bricks crushing her to death. I'm sorry but that co-incidence was just amazing. (Btw - I released chapter 6 four days before the season finale so I couldn't have copied it even if I'd wanted to) Funnily enough, the idea that Lucifer used his wings to protect Chloe was what I initially envisaged, and I kind of created the story around that particular scene.**

 **I thought episode 23 was just fantastic - Amenadiel and Charlotte were superb, and the finale was epic.**

 **Also, I was FLABBERGASTED when they introduced the the marriage storyline between Chloe and Cain (as you probably can gather, I get very invested into my tv-shows and books) BLEURGH. DISGUSTING. And Ella was rooting for Pierce x Chloe and not DECKERSTAR! The traitor.**

 **I hope that Fox will realize the dreadful error of their ways and reverse their decision, because I _really_ need a season 4.**


	8. Chapter 8

**A/N Hey guys! To make it up to you guys for leaving you hanging a week longer than you had to, I wrote and released this chapter early. It isn't quite as long and not as much action happens in it as my other chapters, but I could break it off at a good point.**

 **Thank you to everyone who has followed, favourited and reviewed my previous chapters. I honestly cannot tell you how much it means to me to read your feedback and I try to respond to each and every one of them.**

 **I just realised - I have reached over 10k views! That's so amazing guys and another huge thanks to all of my readers!**

* * *

"Why didn't you tell me what you suspected before?" exploded Lucifer as he paced around the floor.

"Lucifer, how many times must I tell you? I wasn't _sure_. We already have enough to deal with without dragging up a half-baked theory that SHE was behind it," explained Amenadiel, trying unsuccessfully to pacify him.

"We have no idea where to find her brother!" Lucifer shouted, running his hands through his hair.

He perked up suddenly. "Wait." Amenadiel looked up, waiting.

"Lil-" he stopped suddenly when Amenadiel and Maze widened their eyes and changed tack, "-that scheming witch - left us so _many_ clues. She could have done all of that without hinting at who she was. No, she wants us to find her. Why make it so _obvious_ otherwise – the dragon, the iron, the pottery. She named a gang after my capital city for Father's sake!"

Amenadiel caught on to his line of thinking. "So, there must be something in the bag that Elias brought. We need to get it."

Lucifer growled at the mention of Elias's name. "That treacherous, lying bastard. Wait till I get my hands around his scrawny little neck."

Maze had been watching their exchange with a conflicted expression on her face. Lucifer was already darting through the door before Maze suddenly called him to stop.

Lucifer turned around, clearly impatient. Maze shut her eyes and said, with some difficulty, "There's a faster way to find her." She had toyed with the idea of not telling them, for she knew the price she'd have to pay. Lucifer would probably still be able to track Chloe down even without her help, but that would take time, and that they did not have. But now, seeing Lucifer's features brimming with hope and expectation, she admonished herself for her selfishness. If humans had taught her anything, it was that you did everything to protect the people you loved.

 _Wait, what?_ The revelation shocked her. Did she love them?

Yes. Yes, she did. They were the only family she'd ever really had. Linda, Trixie, Chloe, Lucifer and Amenadiel, and even Dan and Ella to a point. Okay, and Charlotte. They had been there for her. She might have a mother, but she was nothing to her but in name. They might be pathetic, sentimental humans, but they were her humans.

She cocked a smile.

"I would be a poor daughter if I couldn't find the woman who sired me."

###

Chloe's wrists were red and raw from struggling against the iron manacles which bound them, and she winced every time they shifted. Her mind was finally clear from the nasty hit she'd taken earlier, although she wanted nothing more than to lie down in a nice, fluffy bed, with her daughter safe and sound at her side.

She sighed in longing as gazed around her pitiful cell around her. It was a dark and dingy place, with the skylight at the top not providing any light or blue sky to illuminate her cramped prison. Judging by that, she'd guessed that the sun had already set, and she was nearing her execution.

The prospect of death had never really feared Chloe during her time as a police officer, and then a detective, but knowing now that her breaths were numbered, and each heartbeat counted down to that point from which she could never return, weighed down heavily upon her.

Oh, how she longed for just one more day. One last leisurely stroll through the sun. One more breeze to caress her face.

Each moment was precious to her now. She cherished each breath. She marvelled at her hands, surprised how she hadn't appreciated the wonder of the human body before this, the wonders of the world. She thought at how other people were living their lives as usual, while she clutched onto each second, unwilling to let it slip through her fingers as time must do.

How she wanted to hold her daughter one last time. How she wanted to say the things she'd never said to her, to her mother, to Lucifer.

Was she afraid, now?

No, not of death; but just the fear that one has when one chapter of life closes and the next one begins. After all, she wouldn't be completely alone. Her father would be waiting for her with a smile on his face, ruffling her hair as he did every time he came home. She could finally tell him everything that she'd wanted to say, that a day didn't pass where she didn't think of him, that she'd hoped he was proud of everything she'd achieved.

And she suddenly yearned for that sweet release, so that she could see her dad again, and didn't have to worry any more. She could picture his face so clearly, but she could also imagine what he'd say.

 _"Why aren't you looking for a way out, monkey? I've been waiting all this time, I can hold out for a few more years."_

He was right. He'd want her to fight, to resist death, not to be resigned to her fate. And the thought filled her with strength anew. The day would come when she'd see him. Just not today.

###

Lucifer looked at her dubiously, and coupled in with the panic etched across his face, Maze felt as though she wanted to shrink into the size of an ant and forget that she existed.

"Are you sure you can track her down?" he asked, sheer desperation in his voice.

She rolled her eyes. "When have I ever let you down, Lucifer?" asked Maze.

Lucifer didn't say anything, but he nodded his head in acknowledgement, before joining Amenadiel at the foot of her bed, an equally concerned expression painted on his face too.

She closed her eyes to steel herself. She hadn't told Lucifer and Amenadiel of the risks entailed. What she was about to do would have weakened her to an almost crippling extent if she had been at her full strength, but in her present state….

She wasn't one to shy away from doing what needed to be done. She could do this. Taking in a deep, firm breath, she cleared her mind, and reached within herself, trying to locate the energy which gave her life. This was the easy part – now she had to use up that energy to locate its source. She visualised a ball of light at her core, and an intense tugging feeling within her. She reached for it, and gave it a mental pull.

She screamed in agony, writhing and thrashing as she desperately held on to maintain the connection in her mind. She saw flashes of images flicker in her eyes: a church, with the mural of Adam and Eve smashed in, a dimly lit room, shards of broken glass everywhere, an altar on a marble floor.

 _A name, I need a name._

She was slipping, she could feel it- she couldn't maintain this connection for much longer. And then she saw it, huge lettering emblazoning the front of the ornate temple. She gripped Lucifer's hand, which was now holding hers, and she opened up the connection to him, so that he could see what she was seeing.

"The Church of the Forsaken."

She'd done it. She'd got the place. She sagged back.

Amenadiel must have been shouting worriedly to Lucifer, who looked equally as agitated a he looked over her and checked for a pulse. But she couldn't hear anything they were saying. It was as if all other senses had been muted, switched off, and only her sight remained. But that would soon fade too. They seemed to be asking her why she didn't tell them, their expressions stricken. She just smiled.

"I knew what I was doing," she whispered, "I _chose_ it. I did it for you, Lucifer, but I did it for Trixie as well," and at this her voice cracked. "Tell her, tell her I loved her."

And then she was falling, falling into the dying of the light, falling into that silent, faraway land.

###

She was back in the large room with the intricate images etched into the floor. There was a terrifying beauty which struck Chloe when gazing at the incomprehensible patterns.

Chloe had been forced to wear a simple white gown, with runes and symbols woven into the very fabric with golden thread. There was a new altar now that was directly next to it, with a spiralling groove etched into it that opened up into different tracks, which snaked down its side and joined the grooves on the floor.

The altar was a solid slab of black marble, and Lilith grabbed Chloe roughly by the shoulders and flung her onto it, so that she was lying down, gazing up at the stone arches above her.

Chloe had tried to find a way out, but there was none. The shackles which bound her somehow stopped her from struggling and trying to attack Lilith.

She closed her eyes and tried not to think about anything except the people she loved.

 _I love you, Trixie, my baby girl. Mommy is so proud of you._

 _Lucifer, I'm sorry I couldn't tell you how I really felt._

A strange sense of calm began to wash over her, and the fear drained slowly out of Chloe's body. She was ready for the end. And so, it was with a steady heart that she heard the dagger being unsheathed, and it was with memories of Lucifer and Trixie playing in her mind that she waited for the fatal blow.

* * *

 **A/N Please do tell me what you thought of this chapter, and I would love to hear your predictions about what you think is going to happen next!**


	9. Chapter 9

She waited for the blow to be dealt, but Chloe felt nothing. Instead, she felt Lilith pick up her hand. Her heart sank as she realized that her murderess was going to drag out her death. Chloe had hoped it would be all over quickly.

Instead, Lilith picked up her hand, and slowly, but firmly ran the blade down the inside of her palm, slicing open her flesh. Chloe bit the inside of her lip to make sure that she did not whimper in pain. She didn't want to give Lilith the satisfaction.

"Look, mortal," snapped Lilith. "Open your eyes and watch." Chloe reluctantly opened her eyes and saw the blood flowing down from her hand and sliding down the grooves on the altar, and like a stream, trickled along the indentation on the floor. "Where is your God now?" she asked softly. "Where is he? Why does he let you bleed, even though he created you?"

Chloe didn't say anything. She didn't know whether she believed in God. But she'd always felt that whether he existed or not, each person took responsibility for their own actions. She'd felt that, as long as you stayed true to your heart and morals, and did you duty to others, then God or no God, you were a good person.

Lilith was now tracing the blade down the side of her face, the touch of the cool metal barely touching her skin, yet if she decided to apply the slightest of pressure, it would pierce it. And so she started to chant, the words strange and harsh to the ear. Chloe recoiled from the words, as she could sense something wrong within them, something deadly, something dark.

Lilith moved the dagger so that its tip was positioned just above her heart. Chloe shut her eyes. This was the end. She was going to die.

 _Just kill me. Just do it. I don't want to wait any more._

"Touch her again, Lilith, and I swear it will be the last thing that you do here."

Chloe had _never -_ no, not ever _-_ been more relieved to hear Lucifer's voice.

She released the breath she had been holding in, hope fluttering within her like a bird shaking its wings to ready for flight. Maybe she just might see Trixie again. She turned her head around, just so that she might catch a glimpse of him, but Lilith's body was blocking her line of sight. She looked up into the face of her oppressor, expecting to see fear and confusion.

Lilith was smiling - far from being crushed, she seemed almost happy. Chloe couldn't believe it.

"You know, Lucifer, I hadn't expected you to come so soon," she said, "but then you were always cleverer than your brothers." She turned around to face him, and gasped softly.

"You haven't aged a day," she breathed, awed. "I didn't expect you to look… the same." She took in his form, drinking in the sight of him, looking him up and down, as if it reminded her of a distant memory. "Do you remember another age, before steel and glass, where things were simpler? Do you remember those days when you were mine, and I was yours?"

Chloe would have flung her hands in exasperation if they weren't bound. This couldn't be real. This was absolutely and utterly _ridiculous_. Lilith had staged all of these murders, and tried to kill her, because she was Lucifer's _ex_ – and a jealous one at that. Chloe decided that she was going to kill him once this was all over– maybe if he didn't have so many deranged, former flings, then their lives would all be a bit easier.

But then she caught sight of Lucifer's face. His eyes were rimmed with red, and there was such a terrible, terrible expression on his face, filled with pure and utter loathing. He didn't seem as relaxed and poised as he always did. No, it reminded her of the time when he turned up at the zombie-themed wedding. He had looked wrecked, unstable, even more self-destructive than usual. And now, he looked about ten times worse. His entire form was brimming with fury.

It was with a trembling voice that he said, "I hate to cut short the reminiscing, I really do, but I think you have something which doesn't belong to you, which you need to return."

He was practically snarling now. "WHY? Why do this? I have never troubled you! I left you well alone! We were never enemies – I even thought we were comrades."

Lilith shook her head, confused. "Exactly, Lucifer, I am on your side, as I always have been. Don't you see? I did this _for_ you. I was trying to help you."

"Help me?" he roared. "Are you insane? You murdered innocent people in order to try and lure me to you! You brainwashed helpless people to murder others and then kill themselves to stage your sick little game, all so you could lead me here! Maze is _dead_ , because of you." And the flood of grief washed over him again, which only fueled his anger.

He stepped forward menacingly, and lifted his arms.

"Well, I'm here now," he shouted bitterly. "LET HER GO!"

Lilith came down the step of her dais, to come closer to him, still shaking her head in bafflement. "Why do you _care_ about this human? She is worthless, as they all are. Humans die every day – it doesn't matter if I hasten the process for a few of them," she said dismissively. Lucifer's look of disgust at her only intensified.

She tried a different tack. "You want _her_ , even when God only put her here so that he could control you, so that he could make you vulnerable?" The words had the effect she was looking for. He stopped, and looked at her blankly, some of the explosive rage ebbing away.

She stepped down further still, her voice soft, as if she was speaking to a child, trying to persuade him. "By putting her here, he tries to tame you, tries to mould you into something else, into his subservience. Think about how He manipulates you, how he tries to turn you into a sentimental fool, like those pathetic humans," she coaxed. "Does she even care for you? Or is that another one of the many tricks He plays?"

Hearing his fears and suspicions voiced out loud disarmed him completely. He felt as though the wind had been knocked out of his chest, while he stood there, dazed. Hadn't he thought about all of these things before? Hadn't he wondered whether he was walking right into his Father's trap by being around her? Lilith resumed her attack, her voice still soft, yet cold like ice.

"I _know_ that you don't want to be a pawn in your Father's game." She paused, knowing her coaxing was working. "Liberate yourself," she urged, "as you did before, when you marched on Heaven. Let me kill her. Let me _free_ you from his clutches." Lilith began to pick up her skirts and make her way towards the altar.

Freedom. Rebellion. It was what he stood for. It was everything he represented.

"She would have died in sixty, seventy years anyway, while you must remain for eternity." She paused again, letting the words sink in.

" _I_ would be a better mate for you Lucifer. I will be your companion, by your side, for ever. Am I not just as beautiful? Don't I wield more power than she could ever dream of? Let us use her blood, and become more powerful. Wouldn't it be justice, to use the very thing that He wanted to cripple you, to destroy Him?"

"Destroy?" he whispered.

"If we unite, then we could march on heaven together. You and me, side by side, as we once were," her voice was more insistent. "We could topple him from his throne. Reduce him to a fraction of His former self. I have languished for aeons, unable to bear a human child that would love me, that would mirror my affections. Instead I have been forced to bear empty corpses for millennia, with eyes that will never look upon me with love. Why?" she laughed bitterly. "It was all because I refused to bow down to a man. Because I wanted autonomy. Can you really tell me that I was wrong to fight back against someone that wanted to commit me into oppression?"

"Why do you need me?" he asked, that same dazed expression on his face, as though he was battling an internal struggle, torn between his heart and his mind.

"Because, my love, you understand me. We chose not to let ourselves be ruled by someone else, and look how we got punished for it. It is time to get justice. It is time to get vengeance. You are the symbol of revolution. The first rebel." Lilith was ecstatic. Finally, after all these years of longing, Lucifer would be at her side, the love she'd always craved finally hers. She would have the power to exact her vengeance.

"No, Lilith," said Chloe. She whipped her head around to look at her captive.

"You are _wrong_. Lucifer represents truth and honesty. He represents giving justice to the innocent and punishing the wicked. He believes in fairness." She looked at him, drawing strength from the familiarity of his figure. "You killed _innocent_ people, people who did nothing wrong. He would _never_ do that. That's why he's better than you all," she whispered, but Lucifer could hear the words she'd spoken.

"I don't know if God really put me here on earth, but I know what I feel. I know that I care for him, and I know that those feelings are real. Because I – I love him." There was a sharp intake of breath. "Because I cannot imagine a future without him in it. Because –"

"Shut up," hissed Lilith savagely, and she slapped Chloe across the face, so that her head struck the stone with a sickening thud.

It seemed to wake Lucifer out of his stupor.

And all hell broke loose.

###

She woke up from the seemingly eternal darkness in the middle of a wheat field.

Strange.

It stretched for miles on end with no roads or buildings in sight. The sun blazed, its heat unforgiving, and the little breeze offered no respite from the scorching heat.

Maze was lying down on her back. She could not tell whether hours or mere seconds had passed from the moment she had woken up. She hauled herself up onto her feet and looked around, surveying her surrounding, empty of everything but rows and rows of wheat.

And then she screamed.

She yelled and she shouted and she stomped her feet and shook her fists and hurled out every curse in every language she knew.

A deep voice chuckled from nearby. "Well, that's quite the display you're putting on there, Mazikeen." A young, athletic man was leaning against a large oak tree which hadn't been there a few seconds ago.

"Who are you?" she growled.

"Michael," he responded promptly, a smile playing about his lips. He looked like one of those guys who lived in a log cabin in some secluded village, with a large lumberjack shirt over his blue jeans, and his windswept blond hair framing his tanned face. He was endearingly handsome, but there seemed to be an inexplicable sense of honesty in his face, as opposed to Lucifer's delicious, deep, dark secrets that you knew were tucked away in his eyes.

"Well, that was surprisingly upfront for one of you lot," she spat out, and then chose a direction and started marching her way angrily through the rows of wheat.

He came up jogging so that he was in step beside her. "There's no point walking you know. You are, quite literally, stuck in the middle of nowhere."

Maze stopped in her tracks.

"Why am I not dead?" she asked him in as rude a tone as she could muster.

"Oh you are," he replied innocently.

"Then what am I doing here?" her acidic tone still not squelching him. "Where is this place anyway?"

"Well to answer your second question first, well – can you guess where we are?"

"Then you wouldn't be answering it, would you?" she pointed out.

He chuckled.

"Guess!"

She paused a few moments. "This is limbo, isn't it? Purgatory." He nodded. Maze fought the urge to punch the guy on the nose. Then she stopped fighting her instincts and smacked him squarely on his nose.

She felt much better.

"Why am I here?" she asked him, while he rubbed his nose ruefully. "Why am I not in oblivion? I shouldn't be here."

"Don't you?" he asked her. "Sit down Mazikeen." He waved his hand, and from the wheat stems materialized two comfortable, leather sofas.

She sat down.

"You are right. Demons don't have souls." Maze shook her head, as if asking 'And?' "But you are no ordinary demon."

"No?" This was news to her.

"Tell me, do you recognize these people?" he asked. And he waved his arm, and there formed two ornately framed mirrors, gilded in intricate patterns. But instead of showing her reflection, they contained different images. One mirror showed Trixie, sleeping soundly at Dan's house, tucked into her bed. The other showed Linda, her head in her hands as she sat at her desk and mulled over a file.

"Yes," she answered. Her heart contracted suddenly at seeing them again.

"And if someone were to kill them, right now, what would you do?" he asked her nonchalantly.

Thankfully, the pictures didn't change, but Maze growled nonetheless.

"I'd hunt down their killers, and once I'd found them, I'd make them beg and grovel for their deaths," she hissed. _And meanwhile my heart would be shredded into tiny, tiny pieces, which I would never be able to put back together again, and I would feel a gaping hole inside me for the rest of time._

"Why?"

"Because I -" she stopped abruptly. "I don't see where this is going." She looked at him accusingly.

"Because you love them," supplied Michael, gently. "And that, my dear, is the beauty of my Father's Creation. The power to love. For it gives us hope. It gives us purpose. You could even say that it makes life worth living. For while it can be painful and bitter, it brings joy."

"And you, Mazikeen, who has, at last, understood that truth, who loves and is loved – how can you say that you don't have a soul?"

She blinked, confused.

"So what am I?" she whispered, "demon or human?

"Neither," he stated simply," and both."

"Forget what I said about you not being a cryptic twit," she grumbled as she thought over what he had said. "So what now?"

"You have a choice. You may return to Hell, and serve as a demon, forever, unable to leave again, and eternally bound to your duties. The other choice, is that you return to Earth, and live as a mortal, but with that, a considerably shortened life and fewer powers."

Maze was stunned. Was she being given a second chance? _Why_?

Michael saw the confusion that must have been evident on her face. He smiled.

"You sacrificed your life to try and save Chloe, and to save Lucifer as well. God has been noticing – and such faithfulness does not go unrewarded. You are now a souled creature," he repeated, "with the capacity to love and create, not destroy and ruin like your former brethren."

"But what do I choose? If I go to Hell, I won't see them again, and I'll be stuck there forever. But if I got to Earth, I won't be immortal anymore. I'll get old and die."

Michael looked at her with sympathy in his eyes. "There was once an age where they called death the "Gift of Men". Now they view it as a curse. But ask your friend, Cain, if you see him again, if immortality is all that it's cut out to be."

"Firstly, that little punk is not my friend, and secondly, I could just ask you, couldn't I?"

"Feisty, aren't you?" he laughed. "Well, I have not yet left heaven, and time really isn't the same there. Besides, I'm not the one who has formed attachments on Earth as everyone who goes there is bound to do. There is something so captivating about humans, isn't there? But you Maze, you who has tasted that sweet nectar of human companionship and affection, you have been transformed, and you cannot return to how you were once before, no matter what you choose."

Michael was right. She had changed. She wasn't just a selfish stooge that blindly followed orders and plotted things for her own gain. She had gained a consciousness, an understanding. She had free will. She had a soul.

"The choice is yours." He let the words hang in the air, letting her think.

"You know, Mike," said Maze thoughtfully, "You really are one of the nicer angels around. You don't have as much spunk as Lucifer, I've got to admit, but you aren't a sanctimonious prat like Amenadiel, or a show-off like Gabriel, or a moody douche-bag like Raziel and Raphael and Peter." She grimaced and made a gagging gesture.

Michael raised his eyebrows, amused. "Why thank you, Mazikeen," he said. "I think."

"So whatever choice I do decide to make, what do I do? I'm stuck in the middle of a field."

Michael paused to think before answering.

"The gates of hell are open night and day  
Smooth is the descent and easy is the way,  
But to return and view the cheerful skies,  
In this the task and mighty labour lies."

"Virgil," she said.

He raised his eyebrows, slightly surprised.

"What?" she snapped. "I read."

"Let his words be your guide, as he guided Dante through inferno. Knowledgeable man, Virgil was." He winked. "My time runs out, Mazikeen, and I need to return soon. I hope my counsel has proved helpful."

"Choose carefully."

And then he stretched out his tawny wings and melded into the atmosphere.

###

Seeing Chloe knocked unconscious by that vicious blow ignited the fury within him. The anger which had been building up inside him, coursing and throbbing and running in his veins, finally exploded in rage and fire and fury. He wings were outstretched, glowing so brightly, incandescent with his passion, while his eyes were blazing with the fires of hell, red and roiling.

"I warned you."

His voice was a cry and a shout and a scream and a whisper at the same time. His entire form emanated with such a terrible, terrible power that was befitting of the King of Hell. The very earth began to shake, and the stones above shook and trembled.

For the first time, there was a true hint of fear in Lilith's eyes.

His hand were aflame with huge spheres of the burning fires of hell, hotter than the sun itself, burning and blistering the stones at his feet, for rivers of fire snaked away from his feet and made their way towards the raised dais.

"Children!" screamed Lilith, "Save me!"

And suddenly, a wall of slithering and snaking demons, filling the air with the rancid stench of rot and decay, came between him and Chloe. Lilith, her fingers splayed, muttered a few words under her breath, and suddenly, the space between them and Lucifer grew even more, until they seemed miles away from each other.

Lucifer threw his ball of fire, melting their bones and slimy shells into one great, liquid mass, yet the hordes were replaced by more. He hefted his sword, forged in the flames of his wrath, and cut through swathes of demons, that vaporised at its touch. He was the king of Hell – the demons didn't stand a chance against him. But their numbers were too great. He could not command them, for they were in the thrall of their mother. There were too many, for as soon as he cut them down, more came to take their place.

He didn't have to destroy them all. He just had to cut a path through to Chloe. Griffins and wyverns and drakons and other winged beasts circled above, preventing him from flying up and over. Lilith had resumed her chanting, holding the sword aloft. There was still some time to midnight. And the thought filled him with a hope, and hope that was bright and filling against the darkness before him. He could sense the ruin that they brought – their need to feast on order and turn it into chaos, their need to suck the vitality out of everything and reduce them to dusty shells.

The roaring in his ears intensified, and thunder rumbled in his head. He was Lucifer. The morning star. The herald of the dawn. The Lightbringer.

Oh, he would give them light.

And he began to glow, glow so brightly, every inch of his skin radiating light, his feathers shining in the light of Heaven, with the fires of Hell. He was like a supernova, the intense whiteness as it exploded, so bright that he could outshine entire galaxies, brighter than the star whose name he bore.

He gazed at his form, composed purely of light and swirling flames, as he incinerated everything that had the misfortune to gaze upon his divine form, crumbling them to ashes, savouring their destruction, as he ran towards Chloe. The demons surged towards him, trying to block him off, only to get disintegrated into ichor.

But then, in the midst of his onslaught, he began to dim down. _What? No! Stop!_ But his body wouldn't listen as it took on its corporeal form before he could truly reach the pinnacle of his infernal power. Immediately, the demons began to swarm upon him again, each of the fallen getting replaced by another.

Lilith was laughing. "You cannot sustain your true Hellish form here on Earth, Lucifer, you should know that. Especially with your little weakness here. Get rid of her, harvest her blood, and you may do what you wish, wherever you wish. It's your loss. Either way the girl dies. You can be at my side, or you can be on your knees."

 _Chloe. Chloe, stay with me._ He stood still for a few seconds, not knowing what to do, and those seconds seemed to stretch for eternity.

"I don't think so, bitch," said a female voice.

Lilith gasped and backed away, a look of terror flicking over her face.

"What are you doing here?" she hissed.

 _Azrael_?

Lucifer looked behind him, and saw all of his brothers and sister, all those who had fallen with him so many years ago. Azrael, Abaddon, Asmodeus, Mammon, Belphegor and dozens of others were standing behind, all with their wings outstretched, clad in armour, ready to fight.

"We may not be able to assume our true forms here on earth, you nasty little minx, but a fraction of our power is more than you'll ever have, you pathetic usurper." Abaddon snarled.

The terror had vanished from Lilith's face.

"Yes, but, I don't think you have hundreds of millions of demons at your disposal, do you Abaddon? I mean, the odds aren't in your favour, are they? Now that your servants, who you got to do all of your dirty work, have turned against you."

Azrael laughed. "We are the princes and princesses of Hell. We'll teach them a lesson that they won't forget," said Azrael, swirling her sword deftly in her fingers. Lilith smirked.

"You'll forgive me, I hope, for cutting short the exchange of pleasantries, but time is running out." said Lilith, flicking the hourglass that she had conjured from the air.

"My children, defend me."

There were a few seconds of silence.

And then the battle began. The two hostile lines surged forwards, Lucifer and his brethren attacking the horde of demons ahead which separated them from Lilith and Chloe. They were hacking and slashing with their powerful swords, dodging stings and venomous bites, decapitating and stabbing. The air was filled with the cries of the demons as they fell, hissing and snarling in their hellish tongues, all while Lilith kept up her chanting.

The floor of the church had changed from smooth marble to the barren landscape of Edom, and balls of fire were being hurled left, right and centre. Their battle line had been broken up, and each of the Fallen were facing their former subjects by themselves. Wherever he looked, he saw carnage and slaughter; he could see his brother Marbas expertly wielding his double edged swords and slicing through a manticore, a beast with the body of a lion and the head of a human, while another, Furcas, summoned two orbs of black flame and rammed them into the demon in front of him. But he knew that their efforts were futile unless they killed Lilith.

Azrael had formed the same conclusion. "We'll cut you a path to the altar. You have to hurry before Lilith kills her. She will become just as powerful as us, and then we don't stand a chance. Well, less of a chance than we currently have."

"We _are_ more powerful than the demons," insisted Abaddon, "but that means nothing when the demons can't die, and just get replaced. Solas is trying to counteract her magic, to stop her from magically altering the dimensions of the church. We should be able to get through."

"Hurry, we're running out of time," shouted Lucifer, and the three of them cut their way through the centre of the demons, Azrael and Abaddon flanking him as they ran, while their fire carved their way through. Hacking and slashing their way, they finally made their way to the foot of the stairs just below the dais, all too late, for the final grains of sand were trickling slowly into the lower bank of the hourglass, and Lilith's eyes glowed as the enchantment was culminating, her hands ready to bring down the dagger in a perfect arc.

The blood was rushing in Lucifer's eyes as he realized he wouldn't get there in time, and the fear that he would never see Chloe again, that he soon would be cradling her bloody corpse hurt him worse than if he had been stabbed himself.

"NO!" he bellowed.

Everything was slowing down. For a moment he thought that Amenadiel had got his powers back. Thunder seemed to be crashing all around him. From the pits of fire that raged on the very floor, strands of glowing, fiery coils snaked their way up from the ground, weaving around each other, fusing together until they formed a spear with three points. It was still forming as he flung it towards Lilith, praying with every fibre of his being that his aim was true.

And he watched, unable to tear his eyes away as the prongs of his flaming trident speared through Lilith's arm, as she screamed as through she was being ripped apart limb from limb, flesh from bone.

Her power over the demons shattered, and they could be finally banished from the earthly realm, the surroundings thick with their raucous cries of pain. They scattered, unwilling to face the fury of their masters, vanishing before their fury could be unleashed on them. Lucifer soared to the dais with pure, liquefied rage both aflame within him, and within his hands. He walked slowly towards the cowering Lilith, still screeching in agony, each footstep echoing into silence. Behind him, Azrael and Abaddon undid the bounds on Chloe, and ushering her to safety. He gripped the trident that was impaled through Lilith's hand, yanking it back viciously.

"That was for Maze," he snarled. He kept advancing towards her, walking slowly. He gripped her face, pulling it towards his, the flames in his hands blistering her face.

"No!" she shrieked, struggling out of Lucifer's scorching blast. But she still didn't relent. With the hand that was still free, she pushed the dagger she was still clutching onto right into Lucifer's heart. His eyes widened. The pain spread through him, slowly turning his insides to ice.

"Demon metal," she whispered, a gleam of triumph in her eyes. "And with your beloved standing right there, I don't fancy your chances." He looked down at his chest, a blank expression in his eyes, his face still etched with shock. Lilith's jubilant expression only intensified with watching Lucifer accept defeat as he released her from his iron grip.

Then he got his other hand and pulled the dagger out of his chest in one fluid movement, and tossed it onto the floor, where it made a loud clatter.

"You know, you were right," he whispered. She raised her eyebrows, confused. "I cannot maintain my Hellish form here forever." Lilith whimpered, still confused.

"But I don't need forever," he said, smiling, before letting his rage consume him, before losing control, before he returned to his true form as the King of Hell. He grew in size, and his skin grew transparent, showing the charred, red skin underneath, his eyes orbs of red inferno. And his incandescent wings still outstretched, he shot a ball of black fire towards her, engulfing her, destroying her, breaking her apart cell from cell, atom from atom, as her shriek of agony tore through the air like a knife.

He turned to face his audience behind him, the room utterly quiet, with an expression of equal awe and fear spread across their faces. Then, one by one, they all sank to their feet, kneeling to him.

He grabbed his trident, and held it aloft.

But before a cry of victory could escape from his lips, his legs buckled, and his eyes turned from fiery to black.

* * *

 **A/N Let me know what you thought! Thank you to everyone who followed, favourited and reviewed and to all of my amazing readers. I couldn't have got this far without you.**


	10. Chapter 10

**A/N That was a long hiatus, but no fear, for I have returned. A huge, enormous apology for my six week absence, as someone who promised weekly updates - Exams started it, then real life caught up with me. BUT - I am back, and ready to roll. I am extremely sorry this took so long to get here, and a HUGE thank you to everyone who has followed, favourited and reviewed because without you guys I would not be here. Some of you had left me such kind messages, and I appreciated them so much.**

 **And, as we've established, I am a little (very) late to the party but NETFLIX IS PICKING UP SEASON 4! Cheers to Netflix!**

* * *

"She might be dead," suggested a surly male voice, a tinge of hope colouring his tone.

 _Thwack._

 _"_ It was merely a suggestion, sister," he responded irritably. "After all the trouble our brother went to save her, he might be slightly annoyed that she didn't survive. I need to decide whether to stay in the immediate vicinity or not when he finds out."

Another _thwack._

Chloe groaned.

"Hush," snapped a female voice. "She stirs."

Chloe blinked, swathes of light illuminating her field of vision. Her joints ached, her muscles ached and she felt pain in areas she did know could ache. She groaned again, and tried to get up, but found that she could not do so. Her mind willed it, but her body refused. The tendrils of sleep wrapped themselves around her, and made attempt to claim her into its own. But before she could fully sink into that happy ocean of dreams, two faces poked themselves into her line of sight, and jarred her back to wakefulness.

And with a sensation that was becoming all too familiar, she realised that something inexplicable had happened to her, and she could not quite remember it at that moment. And when those memories did at last come crashing back to her, she was quite thankful she had not gotten up. She lay there, senseless as she tried to comprehend yesterday's events.

"Why does she not stand up?" asked Abaddon, who had warily backed away from her. He grabbed a wooden spoon from the counter and prodded her with it twice, as though he were a hunter and checking that the prey he had shot was truly dead.

Azrael, however, remained kneeling on the floor at Chloe's side, and swatting away her brother for the third time that day with another _Thwack,_ gazed at Chloe with an expression that was a mixture of pity and sorrow.

"I suppose she struggles to fathom what has happened to her," Azrael mused sadly. "Perhaps she is mourning for the person that she used to be. She grieves for her former self. For all that time she was blissful, though she was ignorant, and did not know the truth. But now, she knows she cannot retun to who she was before. She cannot unlearn that which she has learnt. She was but a child, yesterday. She has grown up, and she cannot return."

Tears fell out of the sides of Chloe's eyes at Azrael's melancholy elegy. When looking back upon it later, Chloe reflected that the sadness in Azrael's tone was sincere, and suspected that perhaps Azrael had mourned for something lost herself.

But just then, all that Chloe could think of was how she almost lost her life yesterday, to a woman brought to life from the pages of mythology, served by demons from the stuff of nightmares. A woman who had despised and loathed and hated every fibre of Chloe's being, and disdained her for her weakness and mortality. She had almost watched her blood be drained away from her body. She had never been afraid of the monster lurking in the shadows, for she had thought that they were just stories.

But it was all true.

And Lucifer's fires kept swirling around her mind, sinister laughs reverberated in her skull, and the vision of spilt blood drenched her until she finally allowed sleep, that balm of hurt minds, to overwhelm her.

###

Maze was bored.

She was sitting on a sofa in the middle of a wheatfield, waiting. Her conversation with Michael seemed an eternity ago. She had lost track of time. Either in purgatory, the sun remained perpetually in the same position, or only mere minutes had trickled by since her little chat with Michael.

She snorted in disgust. Michael had probably thought e was being oh-so-cryptic and mysterious after spouting some poetry and evaporating in a dramatic flourish. She wondered, not for the first time and certainly not for the last, whether the people up above enjoyed watching them wriggle from down down below, powerless to do anything int he grand scheme of things. She wondered if they derived genuine enjoyment from their struggling.

After much cursing and mental fist shaking, Maze returned her thoughts to the situation at hand. She had to admit, to herself of course, that the challenges she preferred were beating the crap out of somebody for information, or disembowelling a particularly nasty sinner. She found mental conundrums tedious. But there was no use now reminiscing about the good times though. Her options were clear.

She could return to Hell as a demon, or return to Earth as a human. Which was it to be?

Humanity was something that Maze used to despise. To be fair, she had only ever received the most debauched and unregenerate of the species down in the Abyss. But over the course of the years spent on Earth, she had come to feel a grudgign respect for the species as a whole. Perhaps, even admiration. As much as humans did stupid and evil things, there was a nobility in most of them, a determination which caused them to keep going even if the chips were down, which caused Maze to drop the idea that they were all shallow idiots, and actually something deeper and more profound.

But to _be_ one of them? To live knowing that their days were numbred, and that their beauty would soon fade, was too heavy for her to bear as one who had always been sure of her existence the next day. How could she give all that and more up?

 _"There was once an age where they called death the Gift of Men...Ask your friend Cain if immortality is all that its cut out to be"_

And naturally, in her indecision, Maze resumed swearing and cursing every angel she could think of.

###

Chloe soon aroused from her dreamless sleep. She had been moved from the floor of the kitchen to Trixie's bed - something she flly appreciated, for the knots and aches in her back would have felt a thousand times worse on her cold kitchen tiles. Azrael and Abaddon were keeping watch by the foot of her bed. The were currently engrossed in a game of chess. It wasn't like any chessboard Chloe had ever seen though. All of the pieces had wings for one. And instead of being abstract representations of the various characters in a battle, all of the pieces were humanoid (well, angelic). They were like small statuettes, meticulously engraved into a clear crystalline material that looked like glass.

"Stalemate," announced Abaddon boredly, after moving his sylph-like queen.

"For the 672nd time in a row," muttered Azrael.

"I need to see my daughter," said Chloe, her voice hoarse. She couldn't recognize the gravelly sound that left her throat. The pair of them started at her request - they hadn't realized she was awake. Exchanging glances with her brother, Azrael turned to her.

"You are still recovering, Chloe. You are not in a fit state to leave the house," said Azrael coolly, in a tone that sounded devoid of compassion or any emotion. Seeing that Chloe was about to protest, she quickly added, "I assure you, Chloe, that your child is completely safe. She is staying with her father - Amenadiel has explained to him and he understands that you will be ... indisposed for a while."

"I am going to see Trixie _now_ ," snapped Chloe, and she threw off the bedclothes and stood up, only to promptly sit back down again when her stomach lurched dangerously and her head began to spin. "Just as soon as the black stuff gets out of my eyes."

Azrael, after a few moments of deliberation, unsheathed a dagger from her belt. Chloe eyed it warily.

"You could have just let Lilith kill me, you know. It would have saved you some trouble," she said.

Azrael stared at her. Chloe was momentarily afraid that she'd gone too far. Then the corners of Azrael's mouth twitched just a fraction.

"I do not want to kill you, Chloe, but to soothe your mind," she stated in that same collected tone, lacking genuine warmth, but strangely not hostile either. "Look into the blade, and focus on your daughter."

Chloe looked at her, and the blade she that was passed into her hands skeptically. Although it wasn't a word that she'd had usually associated with deadly weapons, she had to admit that it was a beautiful dagger. The dagger was lightweight, yet heavy with some unknown force. The blade itself was not particularly polished, yet as thoughts of Trixie came into her mind, the surface of the blade rippled as though it were water, and showed Trixie sitting in her classroom, poring over her sums. Her heart swelled with relief that her daughter was safe and happy, and unburdened by the knowledge that Chloe now had. The familiar sight grounded her and reinvigorated her with a new strength.

"Does every angel have a magic mirror?" she joked weakly as she passed the blade back to Azrael. The angel raised her eyebrows and paused a while before answering.

"Every archangel has the power to open windows into the mortal realm. Some do it in the air, while others, like myself, prefer to use reflections to view what we wish to see," she explained.

"And since when did one of the said observed mortals become privy to the workings of the universe, dear sister?" inquired Abaddon, raising his eyebrows.

"Since the true nature of the universe revealed itself to her," retorted Azrael. "You know, with our Divine Father ordaining her to be on earth, the Devil himself choosing to be her partner at her place of work, and the first woman on Earth holding a knife to her throat in attempt to harvest her blood, I should think."

Abaddon shrugged. "I suppose she is no ordinary mortal," he admitted, yet was somewhat surprised that Azrael had taken such a liking to the mortal girl. Azrael might seem detached, but he knew that she was being uncommonly lenient with Chloe. Abaddon suspected that either one of Chloe's divine talents included bringing out the best in angelic beings, or there was something in the air on Earth which changed the constitution of angelic personalities.

"Where is Lucifer?" Chloe asked.

An awkward pause.

"Recuperating."

"Can I see him?"

"No."

"I want answers."

"Why don't we give you the meaning behind the cosmos while we're at it," quipped Abaddon sarcastically.

"I don't give a rat's ass about the meaning of the cosmos!" she burst out angrily. Perhaps it was not prudent of Chloe to bait an angel or to be throwing insults at someone who could smite her down faster than she could blink, but the words were spilling out of her mouth and she couldn't stop them. "We wouldn't be having this conversation if you'd bothered to lift one of your manicured fingers and stop an evil witch and her horde of demons run loose in the middle of LA!"

She wasn't finished.

"What I want to know is why this happened to _me,_ why there are burns and welts on my hands the size of grapes, why a woman who I've never met before hated my guts with such passion, why monsters from the stuff of nightmares are actually real-" Her throat was hurting from the exhaustion of using her voice " - I want to know why _my_ partner is _the_ Lucifer, and I want to know how I didn't see that he had wings, that he could spew fire, and hurl a goddamn pitchfork. I want to know _how -_ how I was so, _so blind._ "

They were silent. They didn't know what to say.

###

Chloe sat at the table before the pair of them, and she could fully appreciate the resemblance between the two. Damn their divine beauty - she supposed if your face had literally been chiseled by God's own hand then it obviously was going to be nothing less than perfect.

Which brought her to her first question.

"Lilith said that God placed me here on Earth," she said, the words sounding silly to her own ears. But the deadpan expressions on their faces did not waver.

"In a sense, it was our Father that placed all mortals on Earth," began Abaddon. "He, after all, created that wretch Adam and his wife Eve. All mortals are descended in a way from them. Well, most mortals. The circumstances of your birth were slightly different."

"Thirty-five years ago, news reached us down below that Father had sent Amenadiel to Earth on a mission," explained Azrael. "Naturally, our curiousity was aroused, for Father had never sent Amenadiel on such a mission, and never sent him again."

"Oh poor Amenadiel," said Abaddon sarkily to the side, "imagine him actually having a job aside from being Father's Pet Stooge."

Azrael glared at him and continued, "We found out later that his task had actually been to carry Father's blessing to a couple, who had been trying many years for a child, with a baby."

"John and Penelope Decker," supplied Chloe, realisation dawning on her.

"Yes," affirmed Azrael, "and after his blessing, your mother became pregnant, and subsequently gave birth to you."

"Did Amenadiel know all along?" asked Chloe. "He knew that I was the child from his blessing?"

"I wouldn't put it past the sneaky bastard to have known that you were the result of Heaven's meddling," said Abaddon, "but he claims to have only found out shortly before Lucifer did. Apparently, they discovered a picture of Amenadiel and your mother at the place of their original meeting in a bar. He put two and two together, and realized you were the child Father had -"

"What?" Chloe interrupted, horrified.

"I know," agreed Abaddon, mistaking the reason for Chloe's horror. "You'd think Amenadiel would have a bit more class and sophistication. I mean, your mother was praying _years_ for a child, and Amenadiel gives her the gift she'd been longing for, Heaven's own blessing, in some ramshackle bar..."

"Lucifer _knew_?" she whispered incredulously. "He didn't say anyth-"

Azrael looked her in the eye. "Would you have believed him - if he told you?"

Chloe didn't reply. Her mind was still reeling from the new information she had learned. It was not everyday you found out you were personally placed on Earth by God.

"Father himself was involved in your creation, Chloe," warned Azrael, her expression solemn. "And thus you are both a blessing and a curse. Your blood has no small amount of potency."

"That's why she was after me," realised Chloe, "Lilith - she wanted me because my blood has power from Heaven." Again, it sounded ridiculous.

"That's what made me immune," she blurted. That day, when she first met Lucifer, he had asked her his deepest desires, and she hadn't told him. She had resisted. She had since seen him work his trick on other people, and every time it had worked without fail. She was the only exception. She had never given thought to why - but she should've. Lucifer had told her that the more complex people are, the harder they are to read, buut he had managed to crack Linda - and Linda was a shrink. Why hadn't she wondered sooner?

She didn't voice the rest of her conjectures aloud. The fact that she could resist Lucifer's charms was what piqued his interest in her in the first place. If she hadn't, then she would have probably spilled out her innermost desires and not given him a second thought. Or she would have ended up in bed with him and he would have lost interest in her as he did with every other woman. Her unique repulsion to him was what had made him stick around, and truly learn to _know_ her, and _earn_ her affection.

She must have also made him vulnerable. Lilith goading him that Chloe made him able to bleed, and the look of genuine surprise that her bullet had hurt him flashed back in her mind. If Chloe hadn't believed he was human at that moment when she'd shot him, then their relationship would have been extremely different - as in non-existent. But she _had_ believed he was human, and she was too invested in him to think of him any differently now that she knew the truth.

In a flash, she understood. The pieces in this grand game had been set in motion before Chloe was even born. The Great Chess Master making his moves, biding his time, waiting for the ultimate goal to finally become clear and his plan to fall together.

How clever were His moves of play? How precisely did He mapped out the journey of the powerless pawns on his chessboard?

Chloe was always destined meet Lucifer. She had been engineered to stay in Lucifer's life. She recalled the moment he had once burst into her room, his eyes brimming with rage and his voice choked with fury.

 _"Did you know?"_

In the heat of the events that had ensued, she had forgotten to ask him what he meant, and he had never brought it up again. But with a dull thud of realisation, she understood what he had been talking about. He had been asking her if she knew that she was another piece in his Father's game.

"It must have killed him," she whispered, "to stay with me, when he _knew_ that I was in his life because his Father wanted me to be."

All those pieces were slotting into place - the meaning behind all those sayings and phrases she had just assumed was part of Lucifer's unique idiosyncrasy and his weird metaphor were becoming clearer by the second - and she recognised them now to be plain hard facts.

How hadn't she seen it?

How could she have been so _blind_?

* * *

 **A/N - Not a lot happened in that chapter, but Chloe needed to come to grips with the truth. She still hasn't met Lucifer after the whole pillar-o'-fire debacle so who knows what's going to go down.**

 **The Lilith storyline is coming to wraps soon, so let me know if you guys want me to stop the story there, or find a way to continue with more supernatural shenanigans and more characters from way, way back. If I can figure out how to make a poll, I'll tidy up my profile and put one there.**


	11. Chapter 11

**A/N Hey everyone. This is somewhat shorter than some of the other chapters - but is necessary in the grand scheme of things (this story)- and I'm trying to do short and often as opposed to long and 'few and far between'. Hope you enjoy this chapter!**

 **I have reached 20,000 views! Thank you to my lovely readers and commenters and you guys just keep me motivated.**

 **(mild bad language)**

* * *

"Cunning bastard," panted Maze. So Michael had been quite literal when he'd said that the journey back would be difficult. She was literally climbing a ladder in what looked and smelt like a sewer. She assumed the ladder went down. There was no way of telling which direction she was going in. Gravity didn't work the same way here.

She'd fallen asleep in the wheat field after deciding the way she wanted to go, and when she'd woken up, here she was, standing in this dark, damp, dank tunnel, and a very, very dim light up ahead. So she'd started climbing.

It felt like she'd been climbing for hours on end, and yet the light was no closer. Part of her wanted to let give up, to let go of the rusted rungs and plummet to her death.

Could you die in purgatory?

She decided she didn't want to find out, and stuck to climbing the impossible ladder. She let her mind wander away from her arduous task, and stopped her thoughts from straying to the question that had been plaguing her. The questioning as to whether she'd made the right choice.

Instead she'd focused on the reasons she'd chosen to return to Hell.

Hell.

She would be immortal. Powerful. People, humans and demons alike, would tremble before her. As they should. As she was born to be. She would be serving her purpose. The First-Born.

She shuddered at the thought of her mother. The mother that would have killed her to get what she wanted. The mother that _did_ kill her. Before she'd come to Earth, she had only considered a mother as someone who gave birth to a child. Nothing more. But seeing the way that the humans put their offspring first, loved them so deeply, cared about them enough to want them to flourish, caused Maze perhaps once or twice to mourn the affection she'd never received. Trixie had only lived a fraction of the years she had, and yet had taught her so much. And she'd never see her again…

 _Stop thinking about them!_

But the damage was done. The prospect of Hell seemed colourless and lacking in comparison to the vividness of Earth. How could she return, changed as she was? She was no longer a heartless machine who thrived off screams of torture, or derived pleasure from exerting her will over her powerless subjects.

They'd made her weak.

A laugh rippled in the wind that was suddenly gusting along the tunnel. _They made you strong, child,_ whispered a voice.

And suddenly, she had reached the top. She clambered out, and peered back down, but she saw only a white floor. The tunnel had disappeared. She was standing in a room, with two white walls, opposite each other. There were two black walls perpendicular to them, and the ceiling was black.

There was a door in front of her – a black door in a white wall.

 _Open it,_ whispered that same voice. _It will lead you where your mind is set on going._

She could hear the screams of the Pit, and the faint roar of the eternal flames. Her home. As she approached it, out of the corner of her eye, she saw another door materialize in the wall to her right.

The white door had no handle.

"Where does that lead?"

 _It leads to a path of certain pain and loss. You will not want it. Open the door in front of you._

"Don't tell me what to do," she said belligerently, and walked to the white door. This time, she heard the sound of trees rustling in the wind, birds chirping and children laughing. Unlike the black door which led to Hell, this one was not solid, and had a pane made of glass.

 _Only look into the glass if you can bear to see._

"Shut up," she told the voice viciously. She peered in.

She had expected this door to lead to Paradise. Instead, she found herself looking at Linda in a graveyard, laying down a black rose on a patch of grass. She looked several years older than Maze had last remembered her. Linda sat down by the black tombstone, with the air of someone who had done this many times.

 _She visits every week,_ a different voice told her. It was her own voice – somehow filling in the gaps in her knowledge. _She sits by your tombstone for hours on end and talks about her week to you as if you were alive._

Maze, watching through the door, was trembling. Linda had visited her _every week_ since her death? She was shocked to the core. The scene changed, and Maze could tell that this was back in time, since Trixie looked the same. She was sobbing her heart out in her mother's arms. Maze felt a surge of anger rush up inside her – and reflexively vowed to beat up the kid that had made her cry.

"I – I – didn't even get to say goodbye," she gasped out between ragged sobs. "We didn't say goodbye." _Trixie stumbled upon your corpse, as Amenadiel tried to shield your body against her view. She spends this day every year mourning for you._

"No," whispered Maze, "no, no."

She banged on the door with her fists. She saw a torrent of other faces – Lucifer sitting alone at his piano, thinking about all he had lost, Amenadiel, Ella, even Ben Rivers present at her funeral. Her heart twinged at seeing them again, so vivid, so full of colour and emotion and life. All grieving, because she had left them. Because she had been as selfish as before. Because she was given a second chance, and she hadn't cared about them, even though they cared about her.

"Let me go back," she screamed. "I want to go back! Let me see them."

 _Nothing's stopping you._

For at the white door, a golden handle had materialized.

 _Your original choice still stands. Black or white? Your old home, or your new one?_

She backed away, and stood equidistant from both doors. She could hear both now – the snarling from the black door and the sound of a child's laugh from the white.

There wasn't a choice. Not really. She turned towards the white door, her hand outstretched as she pulled the handle.

The walls fell away, and Maze was floating in nothingness. It was a sensation she had never experienced before. She was aware of herself, yet she had no body, no form. There was just whiteness. Just nothing.

She heard the laughter again, like wind rustling through the reeds on the bank of a rushing river.

 _Good choice._

###

 _2 days later_

Pain.

So much pain.

He groaned. And then he rolled sideways off the bed and fell onto the floor.

"Our sleeping princess has _finally_ awoken," drawled Marbas. Lucifer could practically hear the roguish grin plastered across his brother's face. He blinked, and shook his head, trying to clear his groggy mind.

"Piss off," he grumbled, as he grabbed onto his brother's hand to haul his aching body up off the floor.

His head felt as though people were clanging down hammers onto his skull. "Ugh," he said, "I need a shower."

"Yes," agreed Marbas mildly, "you stink." Lucifer would have kicked him but for the sensation that he was going to topple headfirst onto the floor.

When he emerged from his shower, towelling his hair, his head was still ringing, although less vigorously than before. But he was grateful that he could focus on the pain and not think about anything else. The fate of the universe could sort itself out for one more day. But judging from the fact that his brother was still here and looking at him expectantly told him that his plan was about to be quashed.

"You know, Marbas," said Lucifer, surveying his penthouse, "I don't recall the fight having taken place here." The penthouse was _wrecked_. Bottles of every shape and size along with clothes in varying degrees of skimpiness were strewn across every surface. Several glass decanters and ornaments were smashed in. He eyed a few scratches on his beloved pianoforte. He raised his eyebrows.

Marbas grinned lazily. "While you were slumbering in the depths of sleep, dear King, we wanted to truly _experience_ Father's creation. You remember, the _marvel_ he wanted us -his divine children- to bow down before?"

Lucifer yanked back the curtains, and immediately recoiled from the bright sunlight that assaulted his eyes. "How have you found it?"

Marbas smiled. "The mortals are … disappointing, somewhat, but you cannot deny that they have their uses. I daresay a few of us will be sad to go home."

Lucifer walked over to the bar and rummaged beneath the counter for a bottle that remained intact.

"They're all still here?" Lucifer tried to conjure up an image of his horde of siblings leading domesticated lives here on earth – doing the shopping, washing the dishes – but he found that his imagination was not quite that powerful.

"Most of us returned after the battle. Azrael, true to her officious, overbearing self, delegated a few of us to stand guard over your _unconscious_ body," explained Marbas. "In case another one of your former dalliances got any... _ideas_." His voice had taken a hard edge. He started toying with a copper coin in his fingers. Lucifer rolled his eyes. Marbas always was so fickle. Perfectly fine one minute, breathing down Lucifer's neck the next.

Lucifer emerged from his hunt for a drink empty handed. "Oh, don't pretend you haven't enjoyed working your way through all of my liquor, while I was there completely powerless to stop you from setting me back half a million."

"Perhaps you are unaware of the gravity of the situation," Marbas said with false lightness. "You were almost _killed_."

"But here I am, alive and well," Lucifer replied, sounding bored. "Go away now. Off you trot."

"I don't believe this." he breathed, closing his eyes in resignation. "I always knew you were reckless, but this is something else. Do you know how close we came to being completely defeated?" he asked incredulously. "Samael-"

"Do not call me that," Lucifer snapped, his previous levity having vanished altogether. His voice took on an authoritative tone. "You will address me, your brother and king, as Lucifer. Secondly, we weren't defeated, Marbas, and judging from the fact that the sky isn't spitting out red fire, Father's still occupying his throne. 'Order has been preserved' and there is _nothing_ to worry about."

Marbas scoffed. "There is _much_ to worry about."

Lucifer huffed, exasperated, and walked over to the elevator.

"Tell the others that I appreciate their help very much, but they are no longer obliged to stay here, and can get out."

"You can tell them yourself. You'll see them when you exit the elevator," Marbas said.

Lucifer stopped in his tracks, and turned back around. This was an ambush.

"What do you want from me?"

Marbas looked at him not unkindly. He shook his head and held out his hand. Resting on his palm was the coin he had been flipping throughout their conversation. His sigil had been stamped onto one side of the smooth copper surface.

"Lucifer, I am the demon of verity. I am He who answereth truly of things Hidden or Secret. I simply want for you to confront the truth, though there is nothing simple about it.

"I don't lie," stated Lucifer, his voice and temper rising "Everyone knows this."

"You may not utter lies, my brother, but that does not mean you do not lie to yourself." He paused for a few moments. "You haven't even asked about the girl yet."

Lucifer closed his eyes. Chloe. Oh, Chloe. He could recall the image of her lying on the altar, Lilith's dagger poised above her heart, her face strangely devoid of all emotion, just calmness. She had accepted her fate, and had refused to be afraid. His beautiful Chloe, who had been so brave in the face of powers that were bigger than her. Powers and entities that he had caused her, defenceless as she was, to be tangled up in.

"Is she safe?" he whispered quietly.

"Yes," said Marbas gently. "Azrael and Abaddon have been looking after her personally. She is protected day and night . She is as safe as one can be."

 _Day and night? What? That makes no sense - it's only been one day._

"How long?" he heard himself asking.

"What?"

"How long was I out, Marbas? How long have they been guarding her?"

Marbas hesitated.

"Four days."

"Four?" Lucifer repeated, utterly flabbergasted. It had _never_ taken that long to recover before. Not for him. He stood completely dazed. Everything was changing, sliding out of his control…

"I see you have not yet fully come to terms with your… situation," commented Marbas. "Our situation, for this involves us all. Before I press you too hard – you have only just woken up after all – you should have some time to think. We'll resume this conversation later." He tossed the coin up.

Marbas winked and disappeared with a flourish of wings.

The coin clattered on the floor, with a bronze lion, Marbas's shape-shifter form, winking in the sunlight.

* * *

 **A/N the next chapter should be the final one in this Lilith story arc (Lucifer and Chloe will finally see each other after the battle) and a lot of you want me to continue with the story with new characters. I'm not sure whether I can yet, and may decide to just close the story then but we'll see. Thank you to my reviewers for their support - couldn't have got this far without your praise and feedback.**


	12. Chapter 12

**A/N - Hey guys - here's Chapter Twelve.** **Thanks to all my readers!**

* * *

"He's awake," said Azrael.

"How do you know?" asked Chloe

"I know."

###

"Can I see him?"

"No," growled Abaddon

###

"Do you have to keep following me everywhere," vented Chloe, exasperated, having enough. "I mean, don't you want to get out of here? Surely you have better things to be doing."

The pair of angels exchanged glances.

"Believe us when we say we are enjoying this just as much as you are."

###

"He wants to see you," said Azrael, leaning against the doorpost.

Chloe stopped abruptly on her way out to work. She had resumed her duties a week after the "event". It had been twelve days since she'd last seen Lucifer.

She wanted the ground to swallow her up. She'd been badgering them to let her see him for the best part of eleven days, but now that she could, she suddenly felt nervous. On the other hand, she could finally get rid of her annoying, supercilious, invasive, _infernal_ roommates, who insisted on stalking her everywhere. She was getting weird looks at work, and she didn't even have Lucifer to take her mind off it.

So there she was, ten hours later, fidgeting nervously as she stepped into the penthouse. This was where she had seen his wings for the first time. And the next day had woken up dreaming of eagles and pigeons. Beautiful white, alabaster wings with a pearly sheen that glistened like the reflection of the moon in water…

"Chloe?" Lucifer's voice interrupted her thoughts. He chuckled mirthlessly. "I didn't think you would come."

"I wasn't sure, either," she admitted. She went and sat next to him on the edge of the bed. He propped himself up straighter, and took her hand. They sat in silence for a while, not knowing quite what to say. The room was charged with a tense hush, as if one was waiting for the other to begin speaking first.

Chloe scrabbled for something to say. Something other than the elephant in the room.

"You're still in recovery?"

"When one finds themselves skewered at the end of the Demon blade, it often takes a long time to heal. Lilith's little stab wound kept re-opening. So here I am," he sighed dramatically, "imprisoned in my own bed."

Chloe could only nod at his explanation. The next few moments passed silently, neither of them knowing what to say. At last, Chloe could bear it no longer and went for the direct approach.

"You're the Devil," stated Chloe finally.

"Yes." The simplicity of the statement startled her. There were no snarky comments or sarcastic undertones to his voice. He looked at her earnestly, his eyes completely honest. Chloe took a deep breath.

"I want to know the truth, Lucifer, all of it. Tell me everything, from the day you met me. Leave nothing out. "

And so began his story, telling her about how he wanted to take the holiday from hell, how she was the only one who could resist his charms. He told her the whole truth about Maze, Amenadiel, his mother, Cain. Her eyes widened at certain parts of the story, parts that she hadn't heard from Abaddon and Azrael, but she knew that Lucifer wouldn't lie to her.

"You electrocuted yourself, died and went to hell, while you were mortal, for me?" Chloe was aghast. She hadn't realised the extent of Lucifer's actions for her. She was stunned. All of those mad things he done or said...

She stared at him, speechless.

"Well, I wasn't going to let you just breathe your last, was I detective? We'll be here till the cows come home if you don't stop interrupting." Chloe, despite everything, rolled her eyes.

Lucifer resumed his story, leaving out the part where he murdered Uriel. He didn't want the detective to feel guilty about that; his actions were his own. He wasn't ready to confront it now, and so he ploughed on.

It quite a while later when he finished. Chloe sat in stunned silence, trying to process everything she learned. Lucifer braced himself for what he was going to have to do. He took a deep breath.

"I suppose this is the point where you tell me that I'm a danger to you and your family and you don't want anything more to do with me."

"No! Of course not, Lucifer!" He closed his eyes. He'd hoped she'd be the one to do it for him. "I don't care about all that stuff with your… family. I know you, you're my partner. I've had time to think about this," she half-laughed. "You might be the Devil, and people may think you're evil, but _I know you._ I just can't think of you that care about justice, you care about right and wrong. You have saved my life more times than I care to admit. I know that you're an honest, loyal… "

He cut her off with a small laugh.

"I never thought I'd hear Chloe Decker praising me of her own volition." He sighed, gazing at her with a tender affection he didn't know he was capable of.

"You're so… _good_ , detective. You deserve so much more than me. You…" He paused, looking for the words. "I never thought I'd be saying this," he muttered. Then he looked at her, with that same earnestness that made Chloe want to simultaneously burst into tears and launch herself at him in a hug. This was so different from the self-assured, arrogant character she'd gotten to know. This was the part of him that she'd truly fallen in love with.

"For once, Chloe, I care about someone else's happiness above my own. I've put your life in danger, and that's unforgivable. You make me vulnerable, in more ways than one," he added.

The look in his eyes was imploring her to understand, to not make this any harder than it already was. He knew this would scar him. He knew that, without her, he'd turn to stone. But it had to be done. "You came so close to harm, Chloe, because of me. I couldn't forgive myself if anything ever happened to you. "

He reached out to tuck a strand of hair away from her face. He took a deep breath.

"I think, that this has to be goodbye." Chloe stared at him, uncomprehending.

"I'm letting you go. "

A beat passed.

Then she slapped him.

"You don't get to tell me that you're letting me go, Lucifer Morningstar. Technically, I employ you. Only I can fire you, not the other way round." Chloe moved closer to him. Then she said gently, "Lucifer, I work with the LAPD. My profession is dangerous, and I walked into this with my eyes wide open, before I even met you. I have also put you in danger, and if you weren't the Devil, then you would be dead seven times over in the course of our acquaintance. You've been shot, stabbed, poisoned, electrocuted and who knows what else." He chuckled wryly.

Because of me, she thought. She blinked furiously, determined not to cry, but her voice wavered slightly as she said, "I have a dangerous job, but there is no one, not one person, I'd rather have by my side than you. "

She didn't think she'd ever seen Lucifer look so vulnerable than at that point.

They leaned forward at the same time, their lips crashing together. Chloe curled her fingers into Lucifer's hair, leaning into him, holding him next to her as they kissed, like they needed each other to live, as if the physical connection between them was like the need to breathe. He could feel her heart hammering against his, and tasted something sweet on her lips, blood rushing in his ears...

At least that's how he imagined the kiss would have been. Because he turned his face aside as she came closer. Because this was going to destroy both of them. And it would be too hard if she knew how much he loved her.

"It wouldn't work, Chloe," he whispered, looking down, anywhere but her face. He was clenching his fists so hard he thought his knuckles might snap. This was more painful than the stab to his chest with a demon metal blade. He felt as though he heart was being yanked out of his chest and being twisted and crushed over and over.

"We'll _make_ it work, Lucif-"

"Lilith was right," he said.

Chloe blanched. "What?" _How could he say that?_

"You're human. I'm not. You'll wither away and die and rot. I'll stay here forever, destined to rule over Hell for aeons, eternally young, eternally alive. It wouldn't work. You're just... human."

Chloe's eyes were filling with tears. "And what if I didn't care about that?" She knew what Lucifer was trying to do. But it did little to soften the sting within his words. "You are the one that was always about living in the moment, living here and now. Why worry about the future? We'll take each day as it comes, like we always have." She was desperate now, clutching at straws.

Lucifer thought about what Marbas had said to him. _You may not utter lies, but that does not mean you don't lie to yourself._ Every word he was about to say was true, yet it completely betrayed what he felt in his heart. The truth was not black and white. That was only his delusion. The truth was subjective. He opened his palm. He had not felt the pain until he felt the slippery wetness in his fingers.

Chloe looked down into his open hand. A coin with a lion impressed onto its face was spattered with Lucifer's blood. The coin he had clenched so tightly within his palm had sliced his flesh, and rivulets of blood were streaming from it and soaking into the sheets.

"You are doing this to me," he whispered. "You make me vulnerable, Chloe. You make me bleed." She gave a little gasp at that, a horrified, stricken sound. He went on relentlessly, knowing he was ripping her to shreds, knowing there was nothing else he could do. "My brothers and sisters almost died because I rescued you. The balance of the world almost toppled when she got hold of you, because Lilith realised my connection to _you_. I-" and at this his voice finally cracked. "I cannot be around you."

The tears were flowing freely down her face now. "I'm so sorry. I didn't want this to happen -" He winced, stopping himself from correcting her. None of this was her fault. None of it. He hated that she felt guilt. He hated that he was the one doing this to her.

"Please," he begged her hoarsely. "Go."

He closed her eyes, so he wouldn't have to watch her, sobbing, walk away from him and out of his life.

###

She materialized out of the shadows in a flourish of ebony wings. There was uncharacteristic panic etched onto her face. She strode over to Lucifer, leaning on the mantelpiece, staring into the flames. "What is it?" asked Azrael. "What happened?"

Lucifer handed her the slip of paper. He took a long drink from the bottle.

"It arrived in my hand, minutes after Chloe left."

Azrael held the bloodstained scrap of parchment aloft and scanned it in the light. Her eyes widened.

 _Nice try - but it won't save her_

* * *

 **A/N I wrote a nice happy reconciliation where the kiss was real and didn't happen in Lucifer's imagination. But then, being the sad person that I am, I deleted the happy ending part and made it more realistic instead of a sappy happily ever after - I guess this means I'm continuing with the story for now. But at the grand conclusion of this fanfic - whenever that may be - the ending will be satisfying. I hope!**


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